At this point you're really grasping at straws to justify your cruelty, huh?
No, fruit is produced to be eaten by animals who will ingest the seeds and defecate them somewhere suitable for growth. It is not meant to be eaten by animals who defecate in a toilet.
Completely fucking irrelevant how an animal spreads a plant's seed.
Regardless, animals and plants used in agriculture have been modified by selective breeding to suit human needs, so the milk and fruit they produce are now meant for humans. And human agricultural practices ensure a constant supply of both fruit and milk.
You've been selectively bred to work, is it okay to turn you into a slave?
Milk and fruit are both only produced for a limited time.
By each individual plant, sure. But for diverse farming, you can easily get a permanent rotation of fruits going.
You're also completely ignoring the most importat fact - that milk is produced to feed newborns and fruit is produced to attract (and by extension feed) literally whichever species is around.
Well, no. Milk is naturally produced for a limited period so a mammal can feed its young. Fruits are produced year-round every year so a plant can spread its seeds as far as possible.
True, you can't test a literal rock and expect the result to be telling of counsciousness. Good thing the researchers aren't solely determining it by testing behaviour, and instead selected a group in which emergent intelligence is one of the probable phenomena.
I'd hazard the guess they don't, and it's easy to justify it - our current AIs don't have the internal aparatus needed to develop counsciousness (yet). They're way too simple and way too straightforward to be intelligent, whether intelligence is an emergent property or a fundamental structure.
Nah, synthetic food (and eventually discarding our gross meat shells for silicon and metal bodies) is the rightful path. On the way there, veganism is a nice stop-gap for most people.
No fucking shit... anyone with half a brain and a minimum of empathy already knows that.
Yes, yes, the scientific method doesn't discriminate between what is and isn't obvious, but the headline is, as usual, aimed at people with the intellectual capabilities of a 4 year old.
To be fair, I doubt the public would give them a symphony either way. Seems like it'd be expensive and require a lot of training.