Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that the line is drawn 'in theory'. It's that they think they've drawn it in the right place (usually humans on one side and everything else on the other). I think this is pretty empirically wrong and I don't think humans are likely to get it right. Even ignoring that, there's still the suffering issue. There is objectivity at drawing the line to the left of neural nets.
If at some point in the future we discovered a way to identify and measure "suffering" in all creatures, and (given this) further found that the animals we eat do not experience it, then what? What if we managed to measure the opposite of suffering (whatever you want to call that; I'll go with pleasure for now)? What if the animals experience quantifiable higher pleasure when raised as food? What then? I'm sure you h…
Watch a slaughterhouse video, cows fighting for their life, pigs screaming and shivering out of fear.
Animals have the same pain receptors as us.
Carl Sagan was right... they are too much like us.
If you take a completely logical and humanistic approach to this, then you’d realise that factory farming is barbaric and unnecessary.
Most humans don’t need meat anymore to survive... it’s purely for pleasure and we just happily ignore the associated cost with that.