But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of “some level of sentience”, I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?
Swatting a mosquito generally doesn’t induce suffering, if it’s done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won’t suffer from the loss.
But yes, if an animal is probably sentient you should avoid inflicting pain to it, for the same reason you should avoid inflicting pain to humans: because they can suffer.
But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word “harm”, the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.
Indeed, but going against natural interests or not is not the point. The point is about suffering. And more specifically the fact that the amount of suffering we inflict to animals to eat their meat would be inacceptable if it was done to humans.
If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans. Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.
That’s like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don’t look like them: racism.