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That's so ignorant. How can we possibly know how other animals experience pain or suffering? You just assume that the further you diverge from us in the animal kingdom the less animals are able to suffer. That certainly makes things easier.

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I think a lot of it has to do with the means of reproduction of the animal. One might make an argument that [r-type species](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory#r-selec...) have decimating loss factored into their everyday experience and survival strategy. As a different commenter pointed out, driving a car down a highway kills hundreds of insects. As a practical matter, insects are the most successful clade ever, with the largest biodiversity, largest number of individuals, and largest biomass of any land animals (by far). If the end is to reduce human impact on ecosystems, then farming insects seems like a reasonable trade off from a utilitarian perspective.

There has been a ton of research into how different animals experience pain. You are correct that we don't know how they experience it, but based on nervous system structure and other behavior, we can make some conclusions about the nature of the pain and whether it's a basic avoidance mechanism or something more complex that would involve suffering.[1]

That said, I think a good rule is to not cause unnecessary pain/suffering in any living thing (e.g. if trapping rodents, use something that leads to a humane death).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates

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