There are people who won't eat plant matter which could lead to new life (seeds, tubers, eggs, etc.) as it is violence to plants. Consciousness isn't a binary feature you can sort things definitely into have and have-not, it's a spectrum. There is a spectrum of decisions to be made about harming other life to survive, and I've made my choice. I'm not telling anybody to make the same choice as me, but I think many people's choices are unreasonable and more importantly not based on reason or appreciation for life.

>Consciousness isn't a binary feature you can sort things definitely into have and have-not, it's a spectrum.

Of course. But while we can't draw an exact line where it begins, we can certainly categorize some obvious things as being on one side of it or the other.

In terms of thinking, feeling, and suffering, it's obvious that

1. pigs (for example) are certainly capable of these things, as least as much as a young human child, and

2. wheat is not meaningfully capable of these things.

So there is a moral cost to killing a pig that there isn't to killing a wheat plant.

This isn't something particularly revolutionary. It's illegal to torture and kill pigs outside of certain sanctioned contexts, so we recognize this intuitively as a society. We just choose to remain cognitively dissonant when it comes to our food sources.

Serious question: how do you feel about conscious animals in the wild killing and eating each other's?

We don't have the capability or will currently to do much about it in a way that won't devastate the food chain, and thus the environment. So while it's sad and unfortunate, there's not much we can or should do about it, on a mass scale. If I personally stumbled upon a (small, not threatening to me) predator attacking a prey animal, I would personally intervene.

This seems pretty intuitive. I think most people have roughly the same mindset.

If a leopard can't catch something, it will die. We have alternatives. And we know about them. And we can grow them.