Is a plant, an animal?

One of the objections against Veganism that my last post evoked was that 'plants have feelings too and that Vegans are shying away from the ethical implications of killing plants'. I think that's a very valid question and deserves to be examined. I took a few days to ponder on this question and at the end of it, I stand by my last post's conclusion - "It is unethical to cause unnecessary pain and suffering to a living being. However, to survive one must do what one must."

The implications of the second part of my statement should be clear - if you have no other option to survive,  apart from eating meat, you should eat meat. Not doing so would lead to wilful starvation which is a form of violence against oneself.

Now let's evaluate if eating plants is subject to the same ethical compulsions as eating animals.

A Vegan dilemma - To kill or not to kill

A few weeks back, I was involved in an agitated debate with a friend on whether the consumption of meat by humans is justifiable. He was interested in this question from a philosophical/ethical standpoint, while I was interested in pushing my agenda of vegetarianism. Hence, it was not an impartial debate from my perspective. Over the course of two hours, our discussion arrived at several islands of thought such as the definition of sentience, the ability to subjectively evaluate one's environment, the ethical implications of humane meat farming and so on. For instance, we spent close to an hour arguing whether we can categorize animals on a spectrum/scale of sentience. He argued that cats/dogs are vastly more sentient than ants, while I countered that ants can collaborate and build architecturally complex ant-hills, which cats/dogs cannot.