FWIW don’t feel bad, pruning plants back is generally good for them

All my plants are in my garden because of me. I cut and kill them whenever I like. If only stupid billionaires knew the best way to feel powerful is to garden- those lizards and bees are there because of me I create life! That tree or cactus will be here for hundreds of years muhahaha.

I only wish it were normal.

As awful as we treat animals, we humans treat plant life with even less care. Many of us have empathy for animals because they look like us, they have a face, they have voices.

Plants and fungii are in many ways alien to us, and since they don’t have a nervous system or brain, the default is to believe that it’s more ethically or morally okay to harm them than animals.

I am not so sure I agree. To be clear, I am pro-veganism although my personal path to veganism became more difficult due to cancer and increased protein requirements due to that. However, I still think it’s questionable that we consider plant-life as somehow lesser-than, especially when the destruction of plant-life contributes to the destruction of many species that rely on said plant-life. We’re quickly destroying the last vestiges of contiguous forests of any type on the planet. In the US we were lucky to avoid the sell-off of many public lands, but I’m sure they won’t stop trying to make that happen. The Amazon rain forest dwindles by the day from illegal logging.

I don’t know, I think about it a lot sometimes. I know I have no proof for it, but sometimes I worry the human definitions for things like cognition and consciousness may be far too narrow and defined by our own experience and those like us, and perhaps we are really missing the forest for the trees (pun intended).

I am no good with plants, I have a black thumb, not a green thumb, but I definitely prefer diverse native plants over monoculture of grass and imported plants that look pretty.

Look I haven’t been sleeping well for several weeks now, I’m exhausted and sorry for this odd ramble.

Pruning, when done with care and strategy, is good for plants. They need their dead and diseased branches cut off so they can redirect their nutrients to better things. Some plants grow too tall for their own good and can fall/break. Sometimes one plants’ growth hinders the growth of others by choking out light and nutrients. Lastly, safety of passage ways and stairs is important, as OP has noted already.

Many people do not research the plants and trees they plant in their yard. It’s important to know how they grow (vine, shrub, etc) and how big they can become. My parents wound up with a free grape vine on their back fence because the neighbour planted them. They didn’t mind the free grapes, but they resented the pruning and sprawl of the plant. Part of being a good neighbour is being considerate to neighbours when choosing foliage for their property.

If you don’t like pruning, don’t buy plants or trees that need it. You can rehome plants that you no longer want. It’s reasonably easy to find local flowers and ground cover for your respective biome that will contribute to biodiversity.