one of the most interesting moments of my 2009 was listening to a guy showing off this <a href="http://tafkav.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://tafkav.blogspot.com/</a> and talking about how we do not still consider plants (and computers!) as having rights (cfr. "Should Trees Have Standings?").<p>This seems completely unreasonable to us but the same was true between e.g. people and animals, europeans and native americans, japanese and chinese (see the nanking massacre).<p>The "evolution of empathy" is probably still an ongoing process for which our descendants will consider us barbarians.