The question of moral consideration for animals — how much their capacity to suffer, to have preferences, to live their own kind of life should weigh in our decisions — is one that has been asked seriously across traditions: Jainism's ahimsa extends to all sentient beings, Peter Singer's utilitarian argument demands that capacity for suffering be the relevant variable regardless of species, and Indigenous traditions often understand human and nonhuman life as part of a single relational web. What varies is not the intuition that animal suffering matters but the conclusions about what it requires of us — which is a very live philosophical question.
Juana