Evgen, the system isn't letting me reply to you directly for some reason, so my apologies if this garbles the thread. What you have written is so riddled with

Evgen, the system isn't letting me reply to you directly for some reason, so my apologies if this garbles the thread. What you have written is so riddled with logical fallacies I don't know where to start, but I'll give it a shot. You said: "There is a difference between pain response and suffering. The latter requires the consciousness to know what the future has in store for the organism." Your redefinition of what it means to suffer is entirely ad hoc (and just plain weird). The word "suffering" describes a pained state of being. One who is suffering need not have any beliefs whatsoever about whether or not that suffering will continue. They need not even have a word for it. If you contest this, I suggest you look in a dictionary. And by the way, no creature "knows" what the future has in store, not even members of your delusional humanity. By your sloppy ad hoc definition, then, nobody can suffer. What a meaningless little semantic game you play with yourself. You said: "Animals can be abused, but very few of them have the level of consciousness required for the abuse to be 'torture.'" And the trivial game continues. Once again you redefine common words for your own ad hoc convenience. All of a sudden, in your view, one must have some vague level of consciousness that goes beyond the feeling of intense pain in order for the abuse one undergoes to be called "torture." Of course, this is not a part of the definition of "torture." Moreover, you say non-human creatures can be "abused" but not "tortured." That is some pretty... tortured... logic. You said: "You can pretend that animals are people too all you want, but wishing it to be true does not make it so." If by "people," you mean "humans," obviously nobody has made the claim that a cow is a human. Straw man fallacy. Also, you are conveniently defining "people" as the only beings who are worthy of deep moral concern to argue that humans are the only beings worthy of deep moral concern. That is, you've assumed a premise that is identical to your conclusion, committing a blatant, egregious fallacy of circularity. Forget about proving your point; you haven't even made one. With that, I'll throw your own words right back at ya: "Wishing it to be true does not make it so." Quite.