I appreciate your response, lots of interesting thoughts.

One thing I wanted to add is it’s important to realize the bias in how you measure maturity/sentience/intelligence. For example, if you measure intelligence by how well a person/species climbs a tree, a fish is dumb as a rock.

Overall, these are tough questions, that I don’t think have answers so much as maybe guidelines for making those designations. I would suggest probably erring on the side of empathy when/if anyone ever has to make these decisions.