I am not at all impressed by the concept of suffering, which I ascribe to
Jeremy Bentham, who I have down as a silly person and responsible for a lot of confusion.
May I ask why? If one can suffer, one by definition can have subjective experience. And I understand that for you, that is not sufficient for consciousness, which is fine: one of the biggest problems of the whole consciousness debate is what is actually meant by the word. But it does indicate that there is something going on inside rabbits that isn’t going on inside rocks (assuming that rabbits can indeed suffer and rocks cannot).