It starts with one justification. And then ends with another. Even if it was just pests, it's in bad taste to create art through termination of life.

Does that include art that involves plants? Ink made from bacteria?

Of course an HNers gonna ask something like this. Plants have no mechanisms to experience time at a metabolism even near the slowest of animals (ie tortoise, elephant.) Nothing close to a nervous system. When you find out the first pain-bearing plant, don't comment here, go get your Nobel Prize. Don't waste your breath on a specious argument.

I can only trust you'll be so considerate to a nest of termites that infests your house.

Only if they take their shoes off at the door.

What about my computer then, it has a mechanism to 'experience' time, on a level far better than any living being. (The real time clock.) It can process information, which seems quite similar to a nervous system. And it can cry for help via log-files. Seems by your definition I need a really good justification for a reboot.

You're just pulling a pundit...

But to entertain your coy argument. Metaphors are not biology. A computer has nothing close to a nervous system. And has no self modifying parts.