people treating plants as less-alive or less-feeling than animals or less worthy of ethical consideration just genuinely confuses me honestly
like even as a generally-vegetarian creature i don't mostly eat plants because i think "plants are ethically Okay to kill and eat, while animals are not"
in general i don't consider predation to be an unethical act, whether predating on plants or animals. when i kill and eat an onion, for instance, i am recognizing the fact that i am killing and eating another living being, quite similar to me (a literal distinct cousin in fact), who was going to go on to grow into a beautiful plant if they had not been killed before they had the opportunity.
it's rather that i mostly just take issue with the way food is produced generally under capitalism and the cruel treatment of animals bothers me. like hunting or fishing or subsistence/small scale farming doesn't bother me when done responsibly and respectfully.
and even then it's not like me being vegetarian actually prevents any suffering and exploitation because being from california i know acutely that vegetable farming is fucked up in terms of its labor treatment, and i know that a lot of habitat loss is to fuel soybean production. and monocrop agriculture which produces all the vegetarian food i eat is just a horrendously destructive system and i see it as a kind of cruelty to the plants. i would actually say that monocrop industrial plant agriculture bothers me pretty much just as much as factory farms.
i think some states of me who might be headmates it's hard to tell, don't like to eat meat because they are horses and they are vegetarian. there is to some degree a kind of identity like nature of Being a Creature Who Mostly Eats Plants which is appealing to us.
