[uDontKnowMe]

The food chain is an abstraction that describes the natural world, not a moral agent any more than the water cycle is. Wild animals predate in the wild, yes, but they aren't moral agents. Humans are able to reason about our own actions and more importantly we can live and indeed thrive on a plant-based diet. So since there are ways to get our food other than killing other thinking, feeling, suffering individuals, we aren't forced to do so. We just choose to inflict incomprehensible amounts of suffering on animals not out of necessity but because we like the taste of cow milk slightly more than we like the taste of oat milk, or we love the way their flesh tastes, and would rather eat it than cook a plant-based meal.

We inflict billions of lifetimes of misery and torture on creatures with their own desires and will to live, who feel suffering and pain just as much as we do, in service of an utterly unnecessary and trivial benefit, that while we could live incredibly well, even healthier and with less impact on the environment on a plant-based diet, we like the taste of their flesh and excretions too much to choose oat milk and tofu at the grocery store.

Yes it is wrong! Future generations will look back at our time as with disbelief that we behave like this.

[c22]

You're just moving your consumption farther from your leaf of the tree of life--which is totally fine, even most meat-eaters will balk at cannibalism. But what makes you so certain plants are unfeeling and can't experience pain? I observe plants attempting to avoid and heal from damage, so I assume they do have some analogue experiences around feelings of suffering.

[uDontKnowMe]

Unfortunately even if you only cared about plants, you would still be better off on a vegan diet because animal agriculture requires order(s) of magnitude more plants to be cultivated than a vegan diet would, on account of it taking many calories of plant feed to produce a calorie of meat.

[nefitty]

Whether plants feel pain or not doesn't impact our responsibility to reduce the suffering of animals we can naturally better empathize with.

Plants lack pain receptors and the nervous systems to process pain signals. Whatever their "experience", it's safe to assume it is so alien to us as to be incomprehensible. In that case, it's very unlikely any of the concepts we use to describe our lived experiences (ie suffering) would apply to a plant whatsoever. The correlate is trying to imagine what photosynthesizing feels like.

I can viscerally imagine what a bird feels when its beak is cauterized.

[sdwr]

I don't think plants can feel pain. To me, pain is tied to learning and agency. Theres little to nothing a plant can learn from/ change upon being eaten, so why would they be able to feel it?

I bet plants get some version of depression though.