My Vegetable Love

    Reading the Guardian at the moment feels a bit like speaking to a “left-wing” relative and realising that she doesn’t realise that her views are somewhere to the right of Sadiq Khan. But cheers to it anyway for publishing Jeremy Hance’s review of Brilliant Green by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola. 


    Hance’s article got me thinking about plant sentience and behaviour, and made me much more aware of the complex ways plants negotiate and interact with their environments. They have (at last count) 20 senses as opposed to the human 5; they are able to communicate within and between  species, cooperatively and aggressively; they register and respond to being damaged, and dying.



Some of my friends - Tree looked depressed, so I gave him a beer.

    Allowing for some semantic give-and-take, we can say that plants feel pain (also that they are dickheads, see below).The former idea can be a sore point for vegetarians and vegans who get ribbed about cruelty every time they eat a salad. As Hance points out, plants have evolved not to be individuals in the way animals are - Mancuso conceives of single plants as ‘colonies’, many of which are designed to be eaten, or at least to survive the odd nibble. And, of course, plants are so ontologically different from animals that it’s not easy to ascertain what pain is to them.

    That said, it is undeniable and of interest that plants do feel. They send out distress signals when attacked; they deliberately set each other on fire (lookin at you, eucalyptus); someone once told me that flowers scream at rival species, like the bodysnatchers. I have included a 1914 account of a carrot being tortured below this post, for anyone who wants to feel as weird as I do.

(spoiler alert)

    That’s all fairly creepy and opens up visions of a sentient and suffering universe that might encourage those so-inclined to stop up their moral ears and think “anything goes”. And on the flip-side there’s a risk of turning into some Avatar-watching pantheist (kudos to a film that thinks it can mask its crass racial stereotyping through cunning use of the colour blue). But a more curious and even respectful attitude to Auntie Flora might be a good thing, because 1.) plants make the planet habitable, and that’s a bit of an issue, and 2.) I think being, in principle, is worth something, if only in the sense that destruction shouldn’t be unconsidered or gratuitous. Attentiveness to things is a bit of a trendy concept, but a good one. Philosopher Simone Weil wrote that attention presupposes love, which I believe, though being attentive does not entail anything as alienating as soppiness, so it’s a good starting point in unfamiliar ethical territory.
 

In case you were wondering, mate, I am not going to stop eating my green brethren. We understand much more about the suffering of most farmed animals than about the suffering of plants. Harm felt by animals is harm we can understand, unless we choose not to. Comparing humans and animals (especially other mammals) makes endlessly more sense than comparing animals to plants, on account of the shared genetic material and all that. But comparing plants to Donald Sutherland, it turns out, makes the most sense of all.

 

"In a room near Maida Vale there is an unfortunate carrot strapped to the table of an unlicensed vivisector. Wires pass through two glass tubes full of a white substance; they are like two legs, whose feet are buried in the flesh of the carrot. When the vegetable is pinched with a pair of forceps, it winces. It is so strapped that its electric shudder of pain pulls the long arm of a very delicate level which actuates a tiny mirror. This casts a beam of light on the frieze at the other end of the room, and thus enormously exaggerates the tremor of the carrot. A pinch near the right hand tube sends the beam seven or eight feet to the right, and a stab near the other wire sends it far to the left. Thus can science reveal the feelings of even so stolid a vegetable as the carrot."

(Extract from Sir Jagadesh Chantra Bose's article in Nation magazine, quoted in The Secret Life of Plants, Tompkins and Bird)

   

The Badger as Geezer

When AC Grayling invites me to become a fellow of his private university, New College of Humanities, I intend to accept, though, like Richard Dawkins, I will only be in it for the money. I see a future for myself as a professor of Badger Studies. In the absence of a job, conventional hobby or social life, I would like to relate my findings on the portrayal of badgers in various media, and the impact of this woodland critter on the popular consciousness.

Unit 1. The Badger as Geezer.

Anyone who was a child in the early 90s has to be against the badger cull. To us, the idea that badgers live in the countryside at all is strange and unnatural, since our young minds were formulated under the influence of a badger who is far from rural in his lifestyle. Badger is a perennial child, mischievous innocent and lovable cockney. For us, to kill the badger is psychologically unhealthy. To kill the badger is to kill yourself.


Unit 2. The Badger as Gentleman.

Kenneth Grahame's Badger, in The Wind in the Willows (1908) is more of an establishment figure, treated with deference and senior to his companions both in age and wisdom. His outlook is conservative. It surprises me that any patriot or traditionalist can be in favour of culls, when surely Badger is the embodiment of a nostalgic ideal. It suggests to me that conservatives who favour the culls were not read to enough in their childhoods, and this parental neglect expresses itself in an attitude to authority which both espouses old-fashioned values and vents their subconscious desire to kill their fathers, who wounded them with emotional detachment.


3. The Badger as Fear.

 Now we have it. This is the badger as chaos, as enigma, as a threat in teddy-bear's clothing. Notice how the badger multiplies uncontrollably, and is associated with poisonous elements of nature. The twenty-first century badger combines the menace of wildness with the alienation of highly developed technology. It is a subversion of the friendly and humanised badger of the twentieth century. It may even be in some sort of gang. It's starting a riot.

Unit 4. The Badger as Badger.

That's better.

I feel a bit sick after this mammal-themed wallow and I think I know why. It's because pictures of animals have little to do with animals. It's because we grow up lavishing affection on Peter Rabbit, or a pet rabbit, but also with the gradual absorption of the idea that it's ok and more adult to enjoy the same creature in the form of rabbit pie. It goes back to what I said about Nim Chimpsky: we enjoy animals when we give them aspects of the human, but take away those fictionalised attributes and leave them as they actually are - real, sentient creatures - and it's ok to treat them with complete callousness. Saying this, as we do implicitly, is saying that we only care for ourselves. Or, that we can admire something cute or beautiful, but the enjoyment we get out of it does not extend to respecting it, or valuing things that are outside of our enjoyment.

I expect anyone who looks at this will have grown out of cartoon animals. It would be nice if adulthood necessarily meant growing into caring about the real thing.

The Talking Animal

I've been reading a bit about Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee whose life is now the subject of a documentary, Project Nim, by the film-maker James Marsh. As a bit of a spoiler, the animal was taken from his mother in infancy by a psychologist, Herbert Terrace, who wanted to teach him sign language, and was initially raised pretty much as a human. When this went wrong, he was caged up in a research centre, and finally in a zoo, where he died prematurely from a heart attack, possibly caused by all the joints he used to smoke with his 'parents'.

His name is, obviously, a pun on Noam Chomsky, the linguist. Now, if I don't love a terrible pun then I don't love anything (I have long dreamed of having two  dogs called Philip Ruff and Virginia Woof) but this smart-alecy naming of 'Chimpsky' signals the misguided nature of the whole experiment. 'Nim Chimpsky' is a bastardisation of a man's name, and there is no way that a talking ape, in little trousers and all, was ever going to be anything but a grotesque parody of a human.

That is not because chimps are  grotesque. The problem lies in the anthropocentric outlook that led to this animal being seen as an unevolved human, rather than a fully evolved ape. Some animals can communicate with humans but, as Terrace was forced to conclude, not in terms of human conversation; they communicate according to their own needs.  It seems to me that a lot of cruelty is rooted in a divided view of animals, either as completely other - they are not people, so we can do what we like with them - or as inferior versions of ourselves that we can narcissistically relate to but do not have to respect because they are incomplete.

I find it particularly chilling that after his unnatural early life in the bosom (sometimes literally) of a human family, the animal was transferred to a research facility, where he was caged among other apes (having been totally separated from his own species since he was born) who were destined to be sold to a research lab for Aids and hepatitus vaccine experiments.

This development shows a more extreme form of the exploitation that arises from finding the links between humans and other large mammals. They can be interesting to us both egotistically and scientifically, though their usefulness as the subjects of experiments is limited by the same fact that made this experimentation acceptable: they aren't human. We are well aware of the similarities and differences between humans and animals. It is taking a long time to reach the conclusion that neither similarity nor difference justifies a sense of ownership, and that animals are neither hilarious hairy little men, nor material for experiments.