How can we make animal and plant sensitivity more vocal
Answers
It is not just illegal, unsustainable and irresponsible. Mahogany tree logging in the rapidly disappearing Peruvian rainforest might prove wrong for yet another reason: it is inhumane. Of course, a logging site is different from a slaughterhouse. There are no shockingly gory sights of animal suffering and no screaming, aside from the deafening noise of buzzing chainsaws. But the indifference of plants, their imperviousness to being damaged or even destroyed, is deceptive.
Common sense tells us that, unlike their animal counterparts, plant cells are immobile, caged in a dense cellulose membrane, and, hence, insensitive and incapable of producing real behavioural responses. In brushing off the very possibility of plant ethics, critics often rely on what they consider to be an incontrovertible given – namely, that plants lack anything like a nervous system and the attendant capacity to feel pain. As French author Francis Ponge once wrote, plants do not have a head, “pas de tete“. End of story.
Neither science nor philosophy should draw upon the fatuous assumptions of common sense, however. Already in the 19th century Charles Darwin and his son, also named Francis, argued that the analogue of the animal brain is situated in the plants’ roots. This argument has come to be known as the “root-brain hypothesis“. It is worth citing the Darwins’ treatise The Power of Movement of Plants, where they state:
“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed [with sensitivity] and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements."
Answer:
Plants reflect animal sounds to communicate with them. Convergent echo reflectors in several plant species attract mutualistic bats. Reflectors serve as beacons, identification signals or guiding posts. ... However, there is growing evidence for acoustic communication in plant–animal interactions.