Can plants feel pain?

The objection

“Plants are alive. They sense light, respond to touch, signal when damaged, even warn their neighbours. If suffering is what makes harm wrong, take plant suffering seriously too, and the line between a carrot and a cow starts to look arbitrary.”

The answer

Plants sense light, touch and injury and respond to all three [2], but pain has to be felt, and plants have no neurons or brain to feel it with [1].

Are plants conscious?

Plants are almost certainly not conscious: a 2019 paper in Trends in Plant Science put the likelihood at “effectively nil”, given how simply plants are organised and that they have no neurons or brain [1]. Its authors drew on a survey of animal brains and behaviour under which only vertebrates, fish included, arthropods such as insects and crabs, and cephalopods such as octopuses meet the criteria for consciousness [1]. Their target was the “plant neurobiologists” who claim plants are conscious, and a 2021 follow-up by several of the same authors judged those claims highly speculative [2]. As for warning the neighbours, plants do give off airborne chemicals that other plants respond to, but the follow-up points out that signalling between organisms is widespread in biology, down to bacteria in biofilms, and that none of it requires consciousness [2].

Does a plant feel it when it’s cut?

A cut plant registers the damage without any sign of feeling it. Wounding sets off electrical signals called variation potentials in the phloem, and the plant responds with defences such as the hormone jasmonate (Mallatt et al., 2021) [2]. These are the closest thing plants have to the nerve signals behind pain, but they move about a millimetre a second, against half a metre to two metres a second for slow pain signals in human nerves, can fire only once every ten minutes to several hours, and fade with distance, so they cannot carry a signal from one end of a plant to the other [2]. Even in animals, such signals become pain only when higher levels of the nervous system process them, and Mallatt and colleagues conclude that the plant versions rule out any conscious perception of wounding as pain [2].

Do plants scream when they’re stressed?

Stressed plants do make sounds, ultrasonic clicks too high-pitched for human ears, but the likeliest source is plumbing under strain. Khait and colleagues at Tel Aviv University (2023) recorded them from tomato and tobacco plants that were short of water or had been cut off near the soil, at an average of 11 to 35 clicks an hour depending on the plant and the stress, against fewer than one an hour for unstressed plants [3]. A machine-learning model could tell from the sounds alone whether a plant had been cut and how dry it was [3]. Plants have long been known to vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies through cavitation, as bubbles form in their water-carrying tissue under changing pressure [4], and the Tel Aviv team suggest that cavitation in the stem produces at least some of the clicks they recorded [3]. Later work from the same labs, showing that female moths hear the clicks and weigh them when choosing where to lay eggs, calls the sounds probably a cue rather than a signal, meaning they did not evolve to convey information to insects (Seltzer et al., 2026) [4].

If plants could feel pain, would eating meat spare them?

Eating meat would mean more plants eaten, because farm animals take in far more plant matter than they return as food. Worldwide, meat, farmed fish, eggs and dairy use about 83% of farmland and provide 18% of calories, according to Poore and Nemecek’s 2018 analysis of data from some 38,700 farms [6]. In the US, Shepon and colleagues (2016) found that livestock return only about 7% of their feed calories as food, from 17% for eggs and dairy down to 3% for beef, by far the least efficient of the five products studied [5]. Half those feed calories come from pasture and roughage such as hay, so the grass a grazing cow eats is counted too [5]. The feed also includes byproducts, under a tenth of its calories, which the authors could not separate out [5]. Leave out both the pasture and the byproducts and about 800 calories of feed still go in for every 83 calories of food that come out [5].