Nah, you guys are right. You definitely don't have to kill a tree to harvest its fruit.
But then again...
And... forgive me for saying this. I'm really just trying to make a point about semantics at the moment.
"Fruits are the mature and ripened ovaries of flowers [1]. The first step in fruit growth is fertilization of the carpel. Then, a fruit arises from a series of transformations that occur during the development of the fertilized carpel, resulting in the ovary of the flower maturing and ripening."
- https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2020.00027
I don't know how you feel about eggs, fertilized or unfertilized. But vegans do avoid eggs. Why? The egg comes from the ovaries of an animal. There's no baby chicken in chicken eggs. They're not even fertilized.
When you eat fruit you're eating the asexual reproductive organs of the plant. Many animals reproduce asexually too. Inside that fruit is the nutrients needed for the seeds inside the fruit to grow. Are you planting the fruit? Or are you just planting the seeds? Or are you just tossing the seeds in the trash?
Do you preserve the seeds to grow them all? Or do you take the position that these trees have enough population already that not every fruit needs to become a new tree? Let me know. I know it's a really strange argument to make but I'm curious to hear some answers.
How well do you preserve the seed of the trees you take fruit from? And is there some kind of math that makes their lives less valuable and therefore more justifiable to eat? Is it because of numbers or lack of intelligence? Or is it just because they don't feel pain? But not killed? Sure you didn't kill the mother/father, the tree, but you ate the babies in their womb. Or you just ate the womb and spit them out. Or if you eat nuts? Those are seeds, right? So whatever plant that seed was going to be, could have been, is no more. You have consumed it for your own survival. So you don't kill the one tree. You simply "abort" millions more.
Do I want you to feel bad/guilty? Of course not! Never.
But what my hope is... is that we can think outside the box and instead of judging one form of life as being sacred and acting like the other is happy to be eaten (Even though many use thorns, needles, and poison as a defense mechanism to PROTECT its own life), we can begin to see that ALL life is sacred (plants and animals and everything in between) and we are all connected as we are also part of nature, part of the animal community, and we honor life, even as life consumes life. And so instead of pushing our ideas of how life should behave onto life and the degrees of order and chaos that life is, we should instead draw our understanding from life itself and how it behaves. We have millions of sperm to one egg because life already has it built in that the majority won't make it but the survival of "the one" is simply part of a much larger process in the circle of life.
Note: it has even been proven that some sperm cells "murder" others
|
|
