Can plants feel pain?

Given that plants do not have pain receptors, nerves, or a brain, they do not feel pain as we members of the animal kingdom understand it. Uprooting a carrot or trimming a hedge is not a form of botanical torture, and you can bite into that apple without worry.

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Do plants feel pain or stress?

Plants can't feel pain or hunger like animals, but their cells can communicate stress in a way that's not so different from what animals do, scientists have found.

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Do plants feel pain and cry?

Do plants feel pain? Short answer: no. Plants have no brain or central nervous system, which means they can't feel anything.

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Do plants feel pain and pleasure?

The simple answer is that, currently, no one is sure whether plants can feel pain. We do know that they can feel sensations. Studies show that plants can feel a touch as light as a caterpillar's footsteps. But pain, specifically, is a defense mechanism.

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Do plants feel pain when we pluck flowers?

No, plants cannot feel pain. There is no possible way for that to happen without a central nervous system.

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Can Plants Feel Pain? & More! Ask A Scientist #1

42 related questions found

Do my plants know I love them?

Plants may not have feelings but they are indeed alive and have been described as sentient life forms that have “tropic” and “nastic” responses to stimuli. Plants can sense water, light, and gravity — they can even defend themselves and send signals to other plants to warn that danger is here, or near.

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Do plants suffer when cut?

Given that plants do not have pain receptors, nerves, or a brain, they do not feel pain as we members of the animal kingdom understand it. Uprooting a carrot or trimming a hedge is not a form of botanical torture, and you can bite into that apple without worry.

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Do plants dislike being touched?

A new study out of the La Trobe Institute for Agriculture and Food has found that most plants are extremely sensitive to touch, and even a light touch can significantly stunt their growth, reports Phys.org.

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Do plants know they are alive?

Research into plant perception is showing that plants have feelings, they are sentient, they communicate with each other, feel pain and they can plan into the future. Plants, in fact, possess a highly sophisticated neural system and while it does not look like our “brain,” it really is, in actuality, a brain.

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Do lobsters feel pain when boiled?

Most likely, yes, say animal welfare advocates. Lobsters belong to a family of animals known as decapod crustaceans that also includes crabs, prawns, and crayfish.

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Do plants have a soul?

The reason for this is that, despite the lack of any kind of cognition, plants have souls too, according to Aristotle's widely-accepted theory: trees and flowers nourish themselves, they grow, and propagate, and so they have what was usually called a vegetative soul.

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What is the most painful plant?

excelsa. Known colloquially as the gympie gympie (from the Gubbi Gubbi/ Kabi Kabi name for the plant, gimpi gimpi), gympie stinger, and giant stinging tree (D. excelsa), this plant has the dubious honour of being arguably the most painful plant in the world.

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How do vegans justify killing plants?

Plants are exploited for animal agriculture.

It is easy to conclude that veganism reduces the need to grow these excess plants to feed animals. So, even if someone is still worried that plants feel pain, then it is possible to reduce that suffering by switching to veganism.

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Do plants get traumatized?

Transplant Shock occurs when a plant is uprooted or placed in a new pot and shows distressed symptoms afterwards. Plant Shock is a more generalized term that happens when there is stress due to abrupt changes in environment like temperature changes, water stress, over fertilizing, or drastic changes in light.

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Can plants feel being touched?

Scientists already know that plants are highly sensitive to touch of any kind, and even have a word for this phenomenon, “thigmomorphogenesis.” If you've ever touched a Mimosa pudica (also known as the “sensitive plant”) you have already witnessed this phenomenon first hand—the Mimosa's fan-like leaves close up like, ...

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What animals don't feel pain?

While mammals and birds possess the prerequisite neural architecture for phenomenal consciousness, it is concluded that fish lack these essential characteristics and hence do not feel pain.

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Can plants hear humans talk?

Do Plants React to Human Voices? Here's the good news: plants do respond to the sound of your voice. In a study conducted by the Royal Horticultural Society, research demonstrated that plants did respond to human voices. In this study, there were 10 tomato plants, 8 of which had headphones placed around their pots.

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What is the smartest plant?

Orchids are sometimes called "the smartest plants in the world" because of their ingenious ability to trick insects and people into helping with their pollination and transport.

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Do plants live longer if you talk to them?

There is no consistent scientific evidence that talking or singing to plants helps them grow better or produce more fruit.

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Can plants get lonely?

Plants will definitely experience something like being “lonely” in pots because they miss out on underground connections. The majority of plants form symbioses with fungi underground, via their roots. Physical connections between the roots of different plants are …

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Why shouldn't you touch plants at night?

In addition, at night you may not be able to see dangerous, spiders, bugs, or snakes that make their home in trees. In addition, at night it is difficult to identify dangerous plants (e.g. poison ivy, poison oak, stinging nettle, etc.).

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Do plants enjoy music?

For most plants playing classical or jazz music caused growth to increase, while harsher metal music induced stress. This may be because the vibrations of metal music are too intense for plants and stimulate cells a little too much. We think of this like massaging your plant with a song – they prefer a gentler touch.

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Do plants scream when thirsty?

If a drought-parched plant lets out a scream, but it's at a frequency too high to hear, does it count as a cry of distress? According to a study posted on the preprint server bioRxiv last week, the answer could very well be yes.

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Do plants get sad?

Nor does it experience fear, anger, relief or sadness as it topples to the ground. Trees — and all plants, for that matter — feel nothing at all, because consciousness, emotions and cognition are hallmarks of animals alone, scientists recently reported in an opinion article.

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Do plants have feelings?

Plants can sense a lot about their environment and it can cause them stress. Unlike most humans and animals though, when plants face predation, damage, or environmental changes they can't run away and hide. Sessile – or stalkless – plants evolved to be incredibly sensitive to their environment in order to survive.

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