Humans have generally used consciousness, the level of intelligence and companionship to gauge how much of sympathy an organism gets from humanity. This is used to determine which abortion is okay, why it is not okay to kill and eat dogs while other animals are, and why humans are considered above other organisms. If we are to be consistent here, would not it follow that experiment on monkeys deserve more scrutiny over the experiments on monkeys who are demonstrably more closer to us while also having higher level of intelligence than pigs?

Is it "speciesm" to care more for the suffering of humans than that of bacteria? If not, where do you draw the line and why?

Speciesm is when we care more for one animal species over another. For example people in the west will generally have more of a moral issue over eating dogs compared to pigs.

So - caring more for a human or ape versus a mosquito, for example, would be speciesm?

It would be, at least to an extent. Even vegans (which I am) still recognise that some animals are smarter than others, which can result in different moral weights given to them. And it doesn't normally include humans.

I see, so vegans recognize that speciesism is "true" in the sense that some animals do have more valuable lives than others, and harms to some animals are worse than harms to others? Makes it a bit hard to know what the term is designed to achieve. Is it just an attempt to get us to re-evaluate our emotional attachment to some species (e.g. dogs) in comparison to others (pigs) - when it turns out that upon further analysis there's no objective justification for doing so?

> Is it just an attempt to get us to re-evaluate our emotional attachment to some species (e.g. dogs) in comparison to others (pigs) - when it turns out that upon further analysis there's no objective justification for doing so?

Yes it's more just this. It might but I don't think it has a particularly large philosophical underpinning, it's more just used as activism

elwooddogmeat.com is a good example of its use in my opinion.

Don't fall for the rhetorical trick employed here: just because we can call this "specieism", doesn't make it wrong.

That is the point that my example was intended to illustrate.

The thing is that intelligence is kinda orthogonal to the ability to feel pain. Bacteria don't seem to have a nervous system, so that would be a place to draw a first line.