i think with the fish thing, you could ask the person to decide which category fish goes into from 'animal, vegetable, mineral'. i aint personally seen any fish trees recently, and they're sure as hell not made of salt, gold or rock, are they?

but yeah.. maybe i'll read the OP better next time.

Even if plants felt pain just as animals do, I still would eat only plants.  This is because we use an enormous amount of plants to feed the animals that we raise for food.  In other words, you overall   kill less plants consuming a strict vegetarian diet than when you consume animal products.

But I agree, people that say things like that aren't looking for polite debate--they're trying to be funny, or they're being defensive by trying to rationalize their own dietary choices.

:-[  :-\I think about this alllll the time.  It really gets me down and freaks me out.  The more biology I learn the more I see how similar plants and animals are!  Some of the things that really get me:

1. What if plants really do feel pain and humans havent discovered it yet?  Nerves do not have to be the soul means for experiencing pain, they are just the method we know about.

2. Even if they don't feel pain, you still have to KILL a plant to consume it.  This includes raw diets.  The plant goes inside you and *bam* dies.  You end its life.

3. Are seeds or fruits considered alive?  Anyone on vegweb really know anything thing about this?  Is a seed alive?  It's not actually doing anything.  It's not using energy or adapting or reproducing or growing, it exhibits none of the textbook signs of life.....but it's WAITING to do all of that. It would do all of the signs of life at an opportune moment......

4. Is a separate part of any living being considered alive?  For example: is a leaf from a plant alive?  It has cells and they use energy/grow/ do whatever, but the cells are so specialized they have no point detached from the plant.  They wouldn't go on living. But this is just because the leaf depends on the other parts of the plant to work together and with it to maintain life for the plant as a whole.  Same goes for something a little more obvious like a baby's arm.  The baby is living.  Is the arm living?

I pretty much want to say: "yeah, the leaf and arm are living."  The leaf and arm are made up of cells.  The cells are living, it just so happends their arrangement makes for a useless object when detached from the host being.  I was trying to base the classification of living/nonliving on whether or not the "life" in question had a purpose or direction. BUT STILL, the leaf or arm would parish without the host, so they would not be able to fulfill the criteria of life away from the host.  Is it because they're so specialized?  This just goes around and around in circles!

5. And what about bacteria?  I mean they're just little cells with no nerves or anything, but they for damned sure exibit all characteristics of life: need for sustenance, growth and developement, adaptation, "desire" to reproduce, etc.  They even move around!  I probably kill hundreds of them a minute, just by walking over them or scraping them off my arm or who-knows-what. The thought of it makes me batty, all the little things i am KILLING

Ashley--all animals need to consume life to live. That is part of the nature of being an animal.  You are an animal.  You have just as much right to be here as any other living being and you need to eat other living things to survive.  Your thought processes are comendable.  Most people do not even think about such things.  But you can get so bogged down in the idea of "killing" that soon you wouldn't want to eat anything--an attitude which is neither healthy  nor natural.

Going off on a tangent, but replying to a bit of what you said: bacteria are absolutely alive (but are neither plant nor animal---you are actually more closely related to plants than to bacteria).  Bacteria are a fascinating form of life, and by far the most diverse form of life. No plant or animal would be here without them.  The earth would be a whole different place without them.  We are only beginning to discover the phenomenal diversity in the bacterial world--and it is mind boggling. Now this is totally off topic, but here is a video of E.O. Wilson (an evolutionary biologist) talking,with the same passion that I have for biological diversity, and you seem to be the type to enjoy it (I like to share):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8929355237384403995&q=e.o.+wilson&total=177&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3

When someone says, "I don't eat meat" I assume they don't eat fish.

A correction: plants (excluding those that are carnivorous) do not move; the roots elongate and grow directionally to where resources are. Unless an animal can reproduce both asexually and sexually (like a sponge) without any direct manipulation then a single type of cell cannot form new cells by itself, thus, that would not be a good criterion as to say that it's living.

But enough of my rambling! I do believe that animals have senses and that plants don't. Which is why I love eating them so much :P

Here's an additional thought about killing plants for food. If you do not eat vegetables or the plant, it will die anyway. Vegetable plants are seasonal.

I've thought about the plant issue before and have taken AK's perspective on it - but she worded it much better than I would have.

With fruitarianism, you eat what the plant is giving up.  Only a small percentage of fruit naturally makes it to maturity.  Plants understand this and make a lot of fruit for the small percent payoff.  That's why I don't think it's oppressive to plants to eat fruit.  They're expecting most of it to go wayward.  I was a botany major until my second to last semester when I realized the next step was to become an employed botanist (not a lot of jobs).  Plants are bloody brilliant.  They blew my mind in a way very little else has.  They figure tons of stuff out in ways we haven't worked on understanding.