Pain and animals/vegetables

Ok, right off the bat, I have to confess that I love meat and eat it as much as I can, meat, fish, eggs, you name it. I also like eating vegetables. But what gets my goat are the vegetarian Nazi's who want to stop me from enjoying my fried eggs or a big juicy steak. And perhaps the most common explanation is that I cause pain or take life. When i respond that you are worse, you kill and eat the babies (fruit, vegetables, seeds, etc.), I just eat adults, I get bewildered stares. And less spoken about the religious nuts, the better. Anyway, here’s some links that I got when there were some good discussions on this topic on a list.

For the religious nuts who think that halal killing is less painful to animals, here, choke on this.

BRAIN signals have shown that calves do appear to feel pain when slaughtered according to Jewish and Muslim religious law, strengthening the case for adapting the practices to make them more humane. "I think our work is the best evidence yet that it's painful," says Craig Johnson, who led the study at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Johnson summarised his results last week in London when receiving an award from the UK Humane Slaughter Association. His team also showed that if the animal is concussed through stunning, signals corresponding to pain disappear (New Zealand Veterinary Journal, vol 57, p 77).

But how about the fact that plants also do react when you cut them? The sap release or the protection that they give by withdrawal or coagulation of the end. Remember the experiments carried out by Jagdishchandra Bose? The plants show clear cut chemical and biological responses to heat, cutting or any other kind of damage. They give out chemical signals when they are under attack from pests and so on and so forth. So while they dont react to pain as we define pain, but a reaction is definitely there. And its the height of total hypocrisy to claim that we are happy to go about only saving animals when our definition is involved but not other responses.

You might say that this plant reaction to being cut or boiled is an automatic reaction. But lets stick your hand in fire and then see what’s your automatic reaction. See what I mean?

On a more serious note, the damn Taliban have now picked up on this. I quote:

Waziristan, Pakistan. In an apparent attempt to appear forward looking and scholarly, Taliban has declared that Plant Psychology, a disputed field of study under Plant Physiology, is compatible with their own disputed version of Islam. After researching and vegetating investigating for decades, Taliban scholars have finally concluded that plants and vegetables have life and they react to physical and psychological stimuli i.e. plants don’t only feel pain and agony, but they can even hate you for mistreating them.

“Subhanallah! This is a tight slap on the face of infidels who have been calling us backward and enemies of modern science, even though we love RDX, AK47s and audio-video messages. But finally our wise men have been able to conclude what the kaafirs couldn’t even comprehend for so many years. Inshallah, now we will spread the light of our knowledge everywhere.” Taliban CMO Maulana Mushroom Azahar declared from a mountain top.

This is the first time Taliban has discovered something in the field of science, even though they have been pretty regular with discovering new meanings of religion, crime and punishment each day. But this discovery by Taliban has caused them to issue a rather quirky command for the whole Muslim world, which has been already implemented in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan.

Taliban scholars have concluded that since plants and vegetables can feel pain and agony and can even hate you, they are as good as animals and birds. They have declared that halaal, or the prescribed method of slaughtering in Islam, will apply to plants and vegetables too.

Are these halaal or jhatka vegetables?

“With this new information bestowed upon us by Allah, it’s beyond doubt that chopping or cutting of vegetables is as good as slaughtering of an animal. Undoubtedly, the current style of vegetable cutting is haraam. Muslims all over the world are indulging in this sin unknowingly, but now that we have shown them the true path they must reform themselves, or we will have to punish them.” Mushroom Azahar warned the gathering and asked his supporters to behead anyone chopping vegetables in jhatka style i.e. briskly slicing the vegetables apart.

This new command is reportedly causing a lot of inconvenience to the local population, especially to the housewives, who are now spending almost the whole day preparing food. According to the way prescribed by Taliban scholars, people have to first swipe vegetables with a sharp knife without splitting it into two or more disjoint pieces and then wait for the moisture or natural juice of the vegetables to dry up. Taliban scholars have declared these moisture or juices as being equivalent to an animal’s blood. Once the vegetables are considerably dried up, people are allowed to cut the vegetables into separate and smaller pieces.

Local people, especially the women, have been unable to do anything else other than cooking food since the command has been implemented in the area. Restaurants in the region too have been seeing huge backlog as they have been unable to meet demand for vegetables from customers. Such developments have caused everyone in the area to spend more time on food preparation and consumption than anything else. But surprisingly, not everyone is complaining.

“After they banned playing football, watching television, celebrating local festivals, and going to school, we had a lot of free time and we didn’t know what to do. Now all of us are busy cutting and chopping vegetables. I guess they have done a nice job.” Assif Zordari, a local resident told our reporter.