Id say the distinguishing difference is the function being the thing, where suffering relies on the set of distributed tools being used to measure and process suffering.
Many people excuse animal suffering by denying these parts exist, despite being basal and meadurable even in fish.
While I do think to some degree you are right, and we should be careful where we bound expected suffering, but eating a plant is much more like eating a disembodied part of an animal, or cell culture, rather than the full animal nervous experience.
At the very least, near the bottom of the triage. Its a constant energy balancing act as we progress as intelligent life. Also case by case as different eco-niches are fit. Don’t underestimate life and intelligence.
This is coming from a perspective inspired by Michael levin from tufts university, in the understanding of diverse intelligent systems.
As someone aware of decades of legal battles to prevent the gutting of education systems, usually noticeable around local levels, you almost always end up at corpo think tanks like the heritage foundation.
If you’re familiar with the heritage foundation, they’ve been trying to run a project2025 style playbook for decades, and it is only through their success that current administration is a billionaire playground. Reminder that elon musk could directly choose for hundreds of thousands of children to die this year by taking aware their food and medicine, because he wanted to. Also billionaires got an unimaginably generous treatment at the same time, worth much more than all of the food and medicine.
It’s more an amalgam of cooperatively evil assholes, most of which have an absurd amount of money for some reason, but yeah, billionaires are a good chunk of why there are whole groups being funded to spend all day every day trying to kneecap educational efforts, or painting academics as evil satanists who are corrupting your children with science.