Shedding The Green Blood Of The Silent Animals

A Switzerland ethics committee has begun a debate to try and argue for those who cannot speak for themselves. Is it the defense of the unborn from creation and extermination as part of the "designer child" mentality? Or perhaps a criticism of the abortion industry for targeting minorities? Maybe it's an attempt to get parents to stop late-term aborting their children for cleft palates?

No, my friends. The ethics committee is arguing that:

"plants deserve the right to life and that killing them is morally wrong except when it comes to saving humans. In a report on "the dignity of the creature in the plant world", the federal Ethics Committee on non-human Gene Technology condemned the decapitation of flowers without reason."

Often truth is stranger than fiction. However, sometimes truth is exactly as strange as a particular piece of fiction. G.K. Chesterton seems to have won his own game of "Cheat the Prophet" on this one, judging by this passage from 1904's The Napoleon of Notting Hill:"

"...Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed (‘shedding,’ as he called it finely, ‘the green blood of the silent animals’), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called ‘Why should Salt suffer?’ and there was more trouble."

I'm wondering what exactly they're eating for dinner over there in Switzerland...