-- o --
From your beginning you have taken us for granted, used us, and abused us. We have been killed, dismembered, and mutilated to build and furnish your homes; cut and burned to keep you warm; eaten alive by you and your animals; and exploited ruthlessly for food and clothing.
Our bodies have been shaped, bent, and stunted by cutting, by forcing upon us unnatural unions in grafts, and latterly through chemical control.
Plant breeders, knowing what is best for us, have interfered in our sex lives in a most intimate way, and forced upon us bizarre incestuous and unnatural habits...
...So, what of all these 'green initiatives'? Are they out of real concern for mother Earth, and all its inhabitants, or are they just a selfish stopgap, to permit continued rape, pillage, and plunder of the planet, and defer the radical rethink that is overdue?
- "Flora", "The Plant's View", Biologist vol 38 p 76 (1991).
-- o --
On 26th July 2023, vegetarianism became the law.
At the Brussels headquarters of the European Vegetarian Alliance, a reception was held for the supporters of the directive and the press. The EVA's formidable co-ordinator, Demetria Xeniphopoulos, declared in passionate purple prose that "the New Age of Plant-eating Humanity" had begun. "Ho more," she said, "will Man the Hunter roam the world, destroying sentient life. Instead, our way will be that of Woman the Gatherer, responsibly harvesting the fruits of the earth and the protein of the fermenter. By the passing of this directive, we have forged a new vision of humanity and its relationship with the environment, a vision in which male and female, technology and nature are reconciled, in which sentient creatures are accorded their rightful status - as our siblings in the evolutionary family of God." Champagne (sponsored by a major biotechnology multinational) was poured. Toasts to animal rights, single cell protein, radical feminism, eco-responsibility and God the Creator were drunk.
Joseph Pibber was less delighted by the new legislation. Born in the early '90s of Derbyshire dairy farmers, he liked meat - real meat, not the Bactiprot substitute. Rare red blood-dripping steaks, porc au poivre, lamb cutlets with rosemary, beef in beer, Chicken Kiev, liver and bacon, duck & l'orange, roast gammon (sizzling honey-soaked rind criss-crossed with cloves), Christmas turkey, bangers and mash, tender pink salmon fresh from the stream, you name it, he loved it. When the news of the European Parliament's decision appeared on the newsfax, he was tucking into a roast rabbit grown on his own smallholding and tenderly slaughtered in the shed at the bottom of his garden. A tear rolled down his long hooked nose. "Them bastards!" he whispered to himself and the corpse on the table. "I'll fight 'em, I will. Fight 'em!"
He had good reason to be angry, for his struggle against the animal rights campaign had been a long and painful one. In his youth he had worked for a local landowner as a hunt saboteur saboteur, pouring sugar into petrol tanks and training the hounds (with a whip) to ignore aniseed trails. He read genetic engineering at the Sheffield College of Agricultural Technology and started a higher degree (sponsored by a well-known restaurant chain) which was curtailed after new regulations were introduced restricting animal experimentation to governmentally determined "essential areas". Increasing by genetic methods the number of burgers that could be got out of a cow was not deemed essential, or even desirable. The woman he was living with became vegetarian and walked out on him after discovering a packet of kidneys hidden in his sock drawer; thereafter, he lived alone.
In the run-up to the passing of the directive Pibber was often seen at the small protest demonstrations held by dairy farmers, butchers, gourmets and other parties interested in the maintenance of meat in the European diet. These fell on deaf ears; the EVA had planned its strategy with remarkable competence for an international collaboration, and politicians, swayed by public opinion, paid no heed. He also sent a number of letters to the newsfax pointing out the biochemical similarity of living cells. "The single cast-iron distinction between animal and non-animal cells," he wrote, "is the cell wall, which in the case of plants consists largely of cellulose, a molecule that differs only in the orientation of one chemical bond from the major storage sugar in animal cells. Is not one chemical bond rather an insignificant difference to base an entire morality on?" Few of his letters were broadcast, and those that were received bitter criticism for being reductionist and "anti-sentient".
Ironically, he was employed by one of the chief orchestrators of the anti-meat campaign. Genon UK pic was a British subsidiary of the giant US biotechnology company, specialising in manufactured health foods and "enviro-friendly" pesticides. Pibber worked in the latter area as a genetic engineer and by the age of 30 had achieved a considerable reputation for his brilliant work on the pestiplant, a decoy wheat crop in which the genes for making the chemicals which attracted pests were enhanced. Farmers loved it because the pests went for the pestiplants rather than their crops, the public loved it because no harmful substances were released into the environment, and Genon UK loved it because the pests killed the pestiplants before they could reproduce, forcing the farmers to buy new ones every season. In fact they loved it so much that when Pibber asked for a genetics lab to be installed in his basement so that he could work from home, they did so with scarcely a murmur.
Thus were the seeds of rebellion sown.
Pibber's first act of defiance against the new legislation made use of a legal loophole which allowed farmers in poorer areas to shoot crows and other pests which persistently attacked their crops. His defence against the charges of animal murder brought by his irate and bereaved neighbours failed because a) Derbyshire was not a "poorer area", b) cats responding to sex hormones emitted by Pibber's cabbages were not deemed to be pests and c) Pibber had contravened the Equal Rights (Animals) Act by failing to return the corpses to their owners for decent cremation. Pibber then claimed that he had a "carnivorous gene" and therefore pleaded for leniency on grounds of diminished responsibility. The court noted drily that there was no scientific evidence whatsoever for such a gene, fined him heavily and gave him six months community service. Genon UK politely asked him to look for work elsewhere. At the next session of the European Parliament, the directive was amended.
Pibber's next move perhaps owed more to wishful thinking than anything else. The Genetically Engineered Organism Tribunal was presented with something looking remarkably like a rabbit, which Pibber claimed was at the molecular level a modified plant which had lost the facility to make cellulose and chlorophyll and instead made nervous tissue and bones. As he was thrown out of court, the chairman remarked with tears in his eyes that a rabbit couldn't be a plant because it wasn't green. Luckily for Pibber, no-one associated this comment with the sickly, hairless and chlorophyllous bunny left outside the court a few months later with a sign hung round its neck saying "THEY ARE NOW".
Fortunately for public sanity, Pibber's attempts to engineer an animal without a nervous system were unsuccessful. Instead, he published an opinion fax claiming that the fundamental biochemical processes are identical between animal and plant cells, that in essence they are the same with only cosmetic morphological differences, and that therefore plants and animals are equivalent and should be accorded the same rights under law. He emphasised his point by joining a fruitarian extremist group and burning down several hundred hectares of farmers' fields as an act of protest against "plant exploitation". During the resulting three year prison sentence, Pibber had an opportunity to re-think his strategy. One day, it all became clear to him. "Of course!" he muttered. "I've been going at it the wrong way round!..."
When Pibber emerged from prison, he appeared to be a reformed character. He ate his vegetables without complaint, joined another biotechnology company and produced a modified micro-organism that halved the cost of single cell protein. The company was so grateful that it ignored the disappearances of small items of equipment from his lab. And nobody asked Pibber what he did in his spare time.
-- o --
A few years later, a mysterious disease began to afflict the farms of southern England. First a few plants, then entire fields, would be found one morning withered and dead, their stems and leaves reduced to dry husks and twisted into strange and disturbing shapes. The plague did not distinguish between species, and both plants and pestiplants were destroyed. Small puncture holes were found in the stems and chemical analysis revealed that the plants had been subjected to a large dose of growth hormone analogues which switched on nutrient mobilisation and growth processes. Evidently something was draining the plants' nutrients away. Newsfax reporters dubbed the mysterious agent "the green vampire", a name which was to be truer than they knew.
The disease also affected animals. Dogs would be found dead in their kennels, their skins punctured with tiny holes and a good part of their insides liquefied. Of their killers, however, there would be no sign.
The trickle of reported incidents soon became a flood, and government-hired biologists started to investigate the cause. They had little to go on. The puncture marks excluded a virus or bacterial infection. Negative soil tests and the failure of field-covering tight-meshed nets to stop the disease appeared to rule out insect parasites, the most likely cause. No weeds other than those arising from the return to organic farming methods were seen. The scientists concluded that a small animal of some description must be reponsible, but electrified fences placed around fields in the path of the spreading plague did not stop it, implying that the agent had no nervous system. Although farmers patrolled their fields all night with shot-guns, they failed to notice anything unusual; the sea of leaves would rustle innocently in the breeze and look totally healthy in the light of their torches but would still be dead by morning.
Finally the scientists cleared a five metre strip around a threatened field, posted guards with orders to report anything out of the ordinary, and settled down to wait. When a guard noticed what appeared to be a marrow plant sitting in the middle of the cleared area, he thought that the scientists hadn't done their job properly. He reached down to pull it out... and noticed that its roots, exposed on the surface, were moving, writhing over each other like a nest of worms. Revolted but intrigued, he stepped back and watched it for a few minutes. He soon realised that the movements of the roots were not entirely random, but served to propel the plant slowly towards the field. He heard a faint squeak and a delicate touch on his leg. Looking down, he saw that another marrow had bumped into his calf. With surprising speed, a couple of leafy tendrils wrapped themselves round his leg and rose-like thorns on their undersides, their tips glistening with mysterious secretions, jabbed through his trousers and into his skin. His agonised cries soon brought the scientists running. By the time they had arrived, other marrows were embracing the wheat plants and sucking them dry. At day-break they returned to the hedgerows from which they came, digging themselves in and looking for all the world like ordinary plants.
When a research student unwisely tried to pick up one of the retreating vegetables by its courgette-like storage organ with bare hands, it uttered a squeak and exuded a strong acid that caused her to drop it. Thereafter, the scientists were more careful. The roots proved to contain primitive muscle-like structures which gave the plant its ability to move. Movement, of course, required a rich supply of nutrients, and like other plants living under conditions of limited nutrient availability it had additional, rather more aggressive, ways of obtaining them than photosynthesis. That these strategies had been planned rather than evolved became clear when the scientists tried to boil the plants to neutralise their acidic properties. Upon heating, pores opened in the storage organ's skin through which the expanded air escaped, causing the plant to squeak like a small animal in pain. The pitch and volume of these sounds increased as the temperature rose, to such an extent that some of the more squeamish biologists ran from the lab. Which was a shame, for they missed the grand finale; as the water started to boil, a wrinkled growth at the end of the storage organ opened to reveal the plant's flower, a black dot on a blue and a white surface that was distinctly reminiscent of a staring, pleading, eye.
The experiment was, however, a success; the acid-forming cells were killed and the head of the lab, a man with no human feelings whatsoever, tasted the flesh and declared it to be delicious, having a piquant woody flavour. This was just as well, as the nation's food supply was in serious trouble. The squeakers, as the press dubbed them, proved resistant to all the legal pesticides and most of the illegal ones. Their air-bourne seeds infested the reclaimed hedgerows and woodlands, and from them armies of squeakers would descend on surrounding farmland. One day the newsfax reported that two campers had been killed by squeakers as they slept in their tent. Stories soon followed of them entering houses. Gradually it dawned on the government that the squeakers must be destroyed.
Unfortunately, it had reckoned without the power of the media. The public, especially children, had rather taken to them. Holo-TV Channel 54 produced an animated series entitled "Those Mischievous Squeakers and their Vegetable Friends" which became a big hit, squeaker-shaped water-pistols filled the toyshops, greengrocers' windows sprouted cartoon squeakers advertising carrots at ten euros off. People started to keep them as pets, apparently finding the pleasant sensation of one shuffling up and down an arm peeping like a lost baby bird worth the occasional thorn-tipped embrace. The fact that they could and did join the family for meals only added to their attraction. A government campaign to persuade the public to eat squeakers which featured a practical demonstration complete with the final despairing "EEEeeee..." as the flower opened was a resounding failure - public outrage at the idea of eating a self-evidently sentient creature was so great that the minister responsible had to resign. As the plague spread to the continent, the nation's wildlife withered and the hospitals bulged with acid-burn cases, cries went up for an amendment to the Equal Rights (Animals) Act to include squeakers.
Clearly a madman was responsible for the squeakers' creation, and the police set out to hunt him down. A crackly broadcast, evidently generated by a home-made radio set, was picked up by the monitoring unit at Caversham. "Mankind is not fit to live!" the message ranted. "Plant-eating man shall be replaced by man-eating plants! Beware, humanity, for the second coming is upon you - the coming of the vegetable!" The broadcast ended with the traditional maniacal laughter. It did not take long for a fix on the transmitter to be obtained, and after obtaining a warrant the police hurried to the scene.
Unfortunately for British justice, Pibber had become the victim of his own creation. Policemen broke into his house to discover his body lying on a bed. Large chunks had been dissolved by the squeakers which swarmed over it. The coroner recorded a verdict of death by misadventure, declaring that Pibber must have forgotten to feed his vegetables before going to bed and that they had escaped from the lab and gone for the nearest available food source. Rumours of a suicide note were quickly scotched.
In the attic was discovered a huge pile of bones from a variety of animals - cats, dogs, squirrels, mice, rats, goldfish, sparrows, moles, hedgehogs - though not, contrary to the more sensational newsfax reports, any human remains. Many had Pibber's teeth-marks on them. One of the younger policemen involved in the raid asked what the pile was doing there. The answer made him violently sick. When experts accessed Pibber's computer, they found plans for a vector system that would enable the squeakers to pass their carnivorous genes onto other plant species. As the lab had been destroyed, it was impossible to determine if they had been carried out.
Pibber's remains were cremated a few days later. There were no flowers, by request, but a few turned up anyway and ate the vicar.
Mark Tolley 31/08/91
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