my salad screams in horror

For years on this blog, I've argued that scientists will eventually make the case for the existence of vegetal sentience—plant consciousness—and that that will signal the end of ethical vegetarianism. While I don't think the following article is a knockdown blow for vegetarians, it's definitely a move in that direction.

Headline:

Scientists Discover Plants “Scream” – We Just Couldn’t Hear Them Until Now

Scientists have discovered that many plants emit faint ultrasonic clicks when distressed.

It sounds like something out of a dark children’s story. Hurt a plant, and it “screams.”

Not in a way humans can hear, but in a newly documented study, stressed plants were found to release bursts of ultrasonic sound that resemble faint pops or clicks, similar to bubble wrap snapping. These signals, described in the journal Cell, are produced by tomato and tobacco plants when they are dehydrated or physically damaged.

The sounds are as loud as a normal conversation, around 60 to 65 decibels (about 60 to 65 decibels), but they occur at frequencies far beyond human hearing. That means the world around us may be filled with plant noise that goes completely unnoticed.

The ontological fact is that we have to kill to live, and to phrase it in Buddhist terms, killing entails suffering. This is as true for plants as it is for so-called "sentient beings." Plants, as it turns out, may have their own species of sentience. It is the nature of life to create suffering. Just deal with it. And yes, by that logic, you may as well add tasty, tasty meat to your diet.