Due to the intelligence difference it doesn't seem reasonable to even equate one human year to one rat year. There are no ethical complaints with trashing an a

Due to the intelligence difference it doesn't seem reasonable to even equate one human year to one rat year. There are no ethical complaints with trashing an artificial neural network. It could be argued that it is ethical to kill a bivalve because their ganglia is comprised of about 100 nerves. Their "mind" mostly consists of direct signaling from input to response. But what about 1000 neurons? 100,000? 100,000,000? Humans have 100,000,000,000. There likely isn't some perfect dividing point between conscious animal that should be saved and dumb animal that doesn't have a conscious. The negative utility of killing an animal probably increases continuously as the number of neurons increase.