Just to respond to this whole "plants SCREAM when they are cut" thing, this has to be one of the most widely misrepresented facets of biology and one of the most inappropriately applied half-truths I can think of. I'm sorry for the incoming rant but I am sick of being asked to take this idea seriously, as if it isn't just a complete fabrication of what the current research actually tells us. I don't think that the people putting forward this argument take it seriously themselves.
To start with, plants do indeed emit ultrasonic sounds when they are under stress, such as when they are dehydrated or physically damaged. These sounds resemble popping or clicking noises and occur at frequencies that are inaudible to humans, but not to many animals. These are sounds that are the result of a physical process, for example with dehydration, air bubbles form and collapse in the stems of the plant, creating vibrations that result in these ultrasonic noises. These noises are what we mean when we talk about plants "screaming."
Screams in plants are highly unlikely to be the expression of a subjective experience. This is simply a misunderstanding of what scientists mean when they talk about plants "screaming," and honestly, is more often than not the result of reading the clickbait headline but not the study itself... We can't know any of this for certain of course, just as I can't know for sure that you experience pain, but none of the available evidence even implies the existence of subjective experiences in any organism that does not have a central nervous system or a brain.
Compare that physiological response to a stressor, with a scream in an animal. A scream for an animal is a way to alert others of distress, it is indeed likely that plant "screams" function in the same way. They key difference is that in animals, a scream reflects a subjective experience, which is the state of being scared, shocked or in pain. The scream of an animal is not simply an automatic response to a physical process, it is the expression of a subjective experience. Suffering is the morally relevant factor, not relatability, and not empathy.
Plants are complex organisms, and can respond to their external environment in relatively sophisticated ways. Through our recent discovery of what we call "The Wood Wide Web," we understand better the extent to which they can communicate and even share resources with one another, However, we have no compelling evidence whatsoever that plants experience anything even resembling the pain we observe in animals.
I am not aware of any respected botanist who takes seriously the idea that plants feel pain, or a peer reviewed study which demonstrates or even suggests that they do. Plants not only lack a central nervous system or pain receptors, they don't even have nerve ganglia. More fundamentally, plants lack the brain that is necessary to process those signals into a pain sensation, even if those signals did exist. Plants lack all of the biological apparatus we believe is required to experience pain, or any subjective experience of sensation at all. That plants emit sounds and chemical signals is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether or not they are capable of subjective experience.
You can disagree with me on philosophical or spiritual grounds, and it is completely fine if you do. That said, it is dishonest to pretend that this conclusion is based on the current landscape of scientific knowledge, or that this is anything other than an unsubstantiated belief. Nothing we know about plants suggests that suffering, or subjective experience of any kind is possible for them, and there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on that.
The implication that the physiological response to stressors is somehow morally comparable to animals who we know suffer at our hands, is not just inaccurate, it is morally repugnant. I use that term seriously. I find it genuinely revolting to be asked to take seriously the comparison between the suffering of a pig in a factory farm and the chemical response of a sunflower getting their leaf cut. I think that this rhetoric is cynical in the extreme.
This is not an attempt to centre the experiences of plants or to encourage people to value them more. If it was, you’d be encouraging people to eat less meat, since farmed ruminants take in far more calories in crops than they will ever produce in meat, meaning that most meat eating diets require more plants to sustain than a vegan’s does, to say nothing of the vast swathes of formerly forested land now used for grazing. This is less about valuing plants and more about devaluing the pain of non-human animals and put it on the same level as an automatic physiological response in a non-sentient being.
Slitting a pig's throat and picking a strawberry are not morally comparable, and realistically, I think you already know that. I do not believe you are out there in the world behaving as if you believe that every plant you touch, stand on or eat is experiencing pain. I think that this is something you only talk or even think about when you’re arguing with a vegan. To imply that you think that electrocuting a chicken and picking weeds are morally comparable is engaging in mental gymnastics in a deliberate attempt to obscure the issue.
In short, the morally relevant issue is subjective experience, not simply "living matter," or the fact that plants are not "relatable." To pretend that this is why vegans eat plants but not animals, as if there were no other morally relevant difference, is either wildly ignorant of what vegans believe and what the current research actually says, or it is an intentional misrepresentation of both.
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