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Sentience, an arbitrary boundary?

Why suffering, and not life? A tree, a bacterium also pursue their good: is sentience really the right boundary?

Objects to Pathocentrism

Schweitzer, Paul Taylor · Respect for Nature · 1986

1. Pathocentrism makes the capacity to suffer the threshold of moral status: below it, nothing counts.
2. But every living thing, sentient or not, pursues its own good: a tree grows, repairs itself, resists; it 'wills to live' in its own way, without feeling it.
3. If to count is to have a good that can be served or thwarted, then sentience is only one way among others of having such a good: to keep it alone, is that not a new privilege, that of beings who feel?

Therefore So the boundary of sentience might be as arbitrary as that of species: either respect goes to all life that pursues its good, or one must say why feeling alone confers a claim.