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Journalism of Courage
Recently, there was a heartening report from Hyderabad. A group of enlightened citizens got together to save an avenue of ancient banyan trees that had somehow contrived to get in the way of a highway expansion project and had been sentenced to the guillotine. It always astonishes me how trees invariably manage to get into our way, despite not being able to move an inch and despite being in ‘their spot’ much before us. (And they say possession is nine-tenths of the law!) Other trees all over the country are not so lucky, like some 9.64 lakh trees in the Nicobar islands that have been condemned to be felled for ostensibly ‘development’ and ‘defense’ projects.
Now trees (and plants) have always been the strong, silent type – or so we would like to believe. Thus, when an axe or power saw hacks into them or amputates huge boughs without anesthetic, they merely tremble and shudder, and don’t shriek, let alone pick up their roots and flee. There are many (humans and even scientists) who do believe that trees and plants are ‘sentient’, and that, for instance, a carrot does indeed scream when it is rudely uprooted and chopped up into a salad. If you had the right recording equipment you could actually hear them. This must cause vegans some considerable discomfiture. So, is it really a case of us not being able to listen to them because the ‘sounds’ they emit (while being sawed up) are not in the wavelength that our ears can pick up?
This may be nearer the truth than we would like it to be and here’s why. Recently, what also caught my attention was an experiment that had been carried out on a kind of small insect called the treehopper, which looks a bit like the prickle on a rose bush (though there are 3,200 different kinds, all looking different). In Mumbai, I used to make them do backward flips by nudging them. To an ordinary ear, treehoppers don’t make any sounds. But apparently, they communicate with each other by sending vibrations through the plants on which they are perched, by contracting muscles in their abdomens. A scientist investigating an entire family of them (mama plus babies) clipped a microphone to the plant and tuned in and then flicked the plant. At best he believed he would hear the babies scurrying away, which they did, but instead what he did hear was a sound like cows mooing. It was a deep resonant sound, which you’d think was unlikely from a tiny insect. Once the panic subsided and the babies returned to their mother, the moos settled into a synchronised chorus. When the earphones were taken off, all the scientist heard were the normal sounds of the forest around him. So basically, it means that just because we can’t ordinarily hear anything, it doesn’t mean there is no sound being emitted at all.
Now if we were to take this to the plant kingdom it ought to leave us very distressed indeed! What would say, a gorgeous garnet rose, in the prime of its life, sound like while being snipped by secateurs and then rammed into a pin-holder? Even I, a hardcore carnivore invariably exclaim, ‘ouch’ when I see that being done. What would a basketful of marigolds sound like while being strung into a garland destined for the greasy neck of some politician? What would a rainforest sound like when it hears the approach of battalions of bulldozers and the high-pitched screams of power saws? Or spring onions, celery and carrots while being ripped out of the ground and flung into a wheelbarrow?
And it could well get worse! Many animals have what we believe is a rudimentary language. Meerkats, for example, have different warning calls for predators threatening from the sky or those approaching from the ground and, I think, even the kind of predator to beware of: snake or scorpion. In World War II the English famously broke the Germans Enigma code and made merry afterwards. Now with AI and all that, it won’t be long before we might break the animal and plant kingdoms’ Enigma codes, too. Though I shudder to think of what we might hear. As it is, vegans are constantly haranguing us about how animals slated for slaughter convey their distress to each other and us, if we were sensitive enough to listen and catch their signals. Or if we do, how we heartlessly ignore them. It would be truly devastating if the same applied to all their beloved vegetables and grain – not only for vegans but for all of us. Can you imagine the shrieks and completely unprintable language emitted by a field of say cauliflower when farmers begin to harvest them? Or a wheatfield on seeing the approach of a combine harvester? Or a doomed rainforest? If we began to understand what they were saying… well, it doesn’t bear thinking about does it?
And you can be sure, once this happens it will be all over social media – or YouTube and Mytube and whatever! Will it give rise to a new lot of activists called the ‘Just Stop Eating’ group that goes around snatching broccoli from housewives and chocolates from children? (Actually, many in the West do indeed need to just stop eating; it will do everyone good) Sadly, we need to eat to live and as yet there is no purely mineral or metal or plastic diet that we can live on; nor can we photosynthesize. So, living things must be cooked so that other living things (like ourselves) can live.
