You draw the line somewhere, right? Drawing the line at a certain complexity of the nervous system is more sensible than drawing it at "animals" in general, IMO.
There's a big difference in effort, and not much difference in outcome, between doing as the Jains do and simply endeavouring not to kill things on purpose.
I mean, I wouldn't do it, but it seems to me that if you're advocating "as far as practically possible" then it would include that.
And better than friend vs stranger ;)
Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science". Perhaps my consciousness is so dim relative to theirs that it would be analogous to me squashing a bug. I hope that their methods are advanced enough that they don't need to.
They might as well just terminate your primitive nervous system for their own nutritional needs or out of mere hunting instinct. Plenty of animals do this all the time, nature isn't romantic idealistic, it's ruthless and unforgiving.
Consciousness requires a critical mass of brain power. A wolf is relatively intelligent but not conscious, they are biological machines that only think about killing and mating and they have been doing that, without change for hundreds of thousands of years. And if the environment doesn't change then they will continue being identical for hundreds of thousands of years more. Trying to give animals human properties is really very foolish. It's like trying to do that with computers, just because they can give us illusions of intelligence and consciousness, but because computers don't have cute faces and cuddly bodies nobody thinks about it. Evolution really is very efficient but brutally so. Only reason why humans have things like compassion is because it has been evolutionarily advantageous to us. A single human is really quite weak and underpowered, we need to cooperate, it's the key to our progress. It is also why we think babies are cute and why we are instinctively protective of them and why sex feels good. There really is no deeper meaning behind any of it. If we had evolved from tigers then the world would look very (brutally)different, because tigers are solitary and territorial animals that have absolutely no use for things like compassion, empathy or cooperativeness. We wouldn't think twice about killing anything if it suited us, not even other tigers and it would be completely normal to us. If some hairless ape came to us on his high horse and started preaching about morals and rights then we would think that he was crazy, and then we would eat him.