That said, there are some who do think the roots are significant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism
Also, what about animals that regrow limbs? Would you eat the arms of a starfish every so often?
To be clear I do already eat meat today. I am just not convinced about its necessity and am interested in ways to avoid doing it.
Plants lack a brain, the organ responsible for thoughts. There's no more reason to think they have thoughts than a cell inside your body, or a computer. All three can process stimuli and communicate.
"Screaming" is editorializing for page views. They found some plants will produce an ultrasonic click every few minutes when dry or when cut. Because it's sound, and because we're looking at it with a human bias, some articles used the term "scream". But it's similar to when plants release chemical signals to communicate. Just because it's sound, it doesn't indicate they subjectively feel pain anymore than chemical signals would. (And chemical signals are used by cells in your body, and that also isn't evidence for consciousness.)
By the same logic, I suppose rocks "scream" when they are dropped on the ground.
Killing animals painlessly is certainly better than killing them painfully. There are a lot more problems than just the killing though. From the Wikipedia article on slaughterhouses:
> Eiznitz interviewed slaughterhouse workers representing over two million hours of experience, who, without exception, told her that they have beaten, strangled, boiled and dismembered animals alive or have failed to report those who do. The workers described the effects the violence has had on their personal lives, with several admitting to being physically abusive or taking to alcohol and other drugs.
> The HFA alleges that workers are required to kill up to 1,100 hogs an hour and end up taking their frustration out on the animals. Eisnitz interviewed one worker, who had worked in ten slaughterhouses, about pig production. He told her:
> "Hogs get stressed out pretty easy. If you prod them too much, they have heart attacks. If you get a hog in the chute that's had the shit prodded out of him and has a heart attack or refuses to move, you take a meat hook and hook it into his bunghole. You try to do this by clipping the hipbone. Then you drag him backwards. You're dragging these hogs alive, and a lot of times the meat hook rips out of the bunghole. I've seen hams – thighs – completely ripped open. I've also seen intestines come out. If the hog collapses near the front of the chute, you shove the meat hook into his cheek and drag him forward."
Also I have a friend who was vegetarian as a teenager, she wanted to become a vet and one of the things they do is suggest you go to a slaughterhouse and see how it works. She is no longer a vegetarian and loves eating meat, but she didn't become a vet either!
An animal has a conscious will to live on, a preference so to say, and those preferences are the basis of moral consideration.
A plant lacks those kinds of preferences (lacking any brain activity - what we can see are mostly just hormonal cell responses and such; things that all living cells have) and thus the plant in itself is not worthy of moral consideration.
What we're talking about here is that simply because steak is s bit tastier than tofu or saitan isn't good enough reason to slaughter 50 billion animals per year and destroying a good amount of environment while doing it.