PETPEAVES

Every day during graduate school, I would park at the agriculture experiment station and walk the half mile or so to the Agriculture Building where I spent most of my days. Just across the street from the building where I worked was an attorney's office, and on the back of one of the cars was a bumper sticker I noticed every day and remember very vividly still now. It said, "Thou shalt not kill: go vegetarian".

I have often marveled on the irony of this statement. Here I was, a biochemistry major, studying in the agriculture college under the life sciences program, and this attorney thought plants weren't alive. Yes, I know plants don't seem to have feelings, but like I told some students a month or so ago, even they have blood. You just don't recognize it even though you lather your waffles in it at breakfast. It's called 'syrup'. The students were immediately grossed out by the notion.

For most of my life, I have been fully aware that plants are alive. If I am wrong, then everything I learned in college was a complete lie. I think what we really need in this nation is PETPEAVES: People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants Eaten After Violent Extraction from Soil. Plants cannot speak for themselves because they have no mouths or defend themselves because their weapons are not terribly useful against a predator with eyes (except for some cacti which are very good at dissauding any attempt at predation). Nobody represents their interests, and apparently some lawyers are active in the campaign against their rights. Without plants, all animal life on earth would cease.

Save the plants. Save yourselves. Join PETPEAVES.

**This post is mostly tongue in cheek, just for your information, but all the details are true as well as I understand truth**