There's a difference between literally being cellular automata (all life, including you and me) and being treated like a robot. I imagine aliens putting babies

There's a difference between literally being cellular automata (all life, including you and me) and being treated like a robot. I imagine aliens putting babies in boiling water and explaining the unpleasant noise as air escaping the lungs as an example. Pretty much any vertebrate meets the definition of sentience (can feel pain). And we still torture them because we assume their internal experience of pain is not as rich as our own If we accept that dogs are pretty smart and deserve protections similar to that of a person (eg if you beat your dog to death you're going to jail) then pigs are even more emotionally complex, and our other "food sources" are in similar territory.