Apparently, they have a “bill of rights” for plants in Switzerland. One writer claims that singling out weeds for destruction is “botanical racism”:
…ENDING BOTANICAL RACISM E.Woodford spoke to poster of botanical racism. This phrase means different things to different people. To us it means that weeds have as much right to exist as do plants with cultivated blooms.The spirit-filled volunteers called weeds are usually stronger, more and more prolific than cultivated plants.
While anybody who talks to his plants would be considered eccentric, it would be difficult to find a pet owner who does not talk to his animal. Yes, I’ll admit it. I talk to my cat – but I would not give my life for her or imagine that her life is as valuable as that of a human. Nor would I spend thousands of dollars curing her of a disease; that money could be more humanely spent. I think it’s a safe bet that she will not be reading this post.
The organized animal rights movement can trace its roots back some two hundred years. Not surprisingly, it was the British and Americans who pioneered this field. The same British and Americans who fought to abolish slavery.
While the issue of slavery is not necessarily a racial one, it is difficult to deny that there were racial overtones – especially as it existed in the 19th century. Though few, at the time, would argue that the darker races were the equals of whites, nevertheless there was clamoring for humane treatment of these people. After all, they have rights.
In ancient times, it was typically economics or nationality that was linked to slavery. Poor people sold their children into slavery and the soldiers of vanquished armies became slaves. In ancient Rome, while slaves had few rights, over time their lot improved. After all, even though a slave was likely from a lower class, or a foreigner, he was still human – and worthy of some rights.
Over the course of history, rights and suffrage have been granted more and more liberally. Granted, this progression has not always been smooth. Yet a pattern is discernible. Western society has been granting these rights to the most worthy first and then, in more or less chronological order, including the more lowly. The rights of women and children are a special case – for obvious reasons.
I wonder how many foreign slaves, upon receiving their new rights, realized that they were the beginning of a continuum that would extend all the way to weeds.
Karl Marx once said that civil rights was a revolution in permanence. After ending all bigotry of race, gender, and animal species, the left can now move on to plants.
Boulder, Colorado has a vegetable rights association. I know this because it was mentioned in passing in an MSM article several years back about how technology is pardoxically turning every place into every place else AND into a place more and more parodically like itself. The article pointed to Boulder by saying that the left wing has totally perched itself there once the word got out that Boulder was a good place for liberals to be. The more leftists that settled there, the crazier left it got, which attracted even crazier leftists, which made Boulder even more leftist, which attracted even crazier leftists still…somewhere in that dynamo, the vegetable rights group was born.
The term weed is a nonsense term. There is no species of plant that can be classified as a weed through any sort of scientific method. I find the most pleasant yards to look at those yards that have let plant life grow in a wild manner without any sort of mowing.
I think it depends on context. If you’re trying to grow a garden for food, then wild plants, that choke out the ones you need, are “weeds”.
If plants have “rights” then what are we going to eat?.
I’m already sick of daughter no.4 (aged 14)lecturing me on the evils of eating meat.
Is it ok to eat fungi?.Mushrooms and truffles ar’nt really plants and they are definitely not animals.
What a strange world we live in.
LOL at the Swiss. Cant believe This is the same country that banned minarets not too long ago. I still admire them, though.
Yeah, there are people that only eat fruit that has dropped from the tree on it’s own, therefore they did not “take it’s life.”
My brother and his wife have big birthday parties for their two little dogs. Their life revolves around those wimpy little yip-yips.
I think part of the problem is that so many liberals have no children of their own, so they have some reserve maternal/paternal compassion not expended. It is instead projected towards animals, Africans, and holy crap plants?!!
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