I make it an effort to respect all living things -- I'm adverse to killing anything that doesn't pose a threat to me or my family. I catch lizards and bugs and mice in my house -- I take them outside and let them go. Most spiders are welcome, but the venomous ones do get the boot. I sometimes will try to capture even the dangerous ones and take them far enough away that they are no longer a threat.

I don't take it to an extreme -- I regularly splatter bugs on the windshield of my car. Though, it's fun to view it from the prospective of a potentially conscious bug, fighting the invasion of the scourge of the giant genocidal automobiles, bugs suicidally hurtling themselves at the attackers in a futile attempt to defeat them. I also don't extend the courtesy to plants.

Why? Life is precious and rare, regardless of what form it's in. Just the fact that we don't know if these creatures have a consciousness is enough for me. Someone with an IQ of 1 deserves to live as much as anyone else.

> Is there a line?

There's good reason to believe that there isn't. Which means it's ultimately a political question and will always have an arbitrary answer.

What is that good reason, pray tell?

These things evolved, piece by piece, over millions of years.

As did quadrupeds and bipeds, but if asked to draw a line about their locomotion that is quite easy to do.

Have not seen a convincing argument that we will not find an evolutionary line in the sand between sentient and automaton animals.

If you look at both quadrupeds and bipeds, you'll see around the time they evolved an interrim period in which creatures existed that were not really quadrupeds or bipeds.

Evolutionary success creates only the illusion of lines, none really exist.

You take the word 'line' too literally here, it just means a boundary.

Reality has very few lines.

Using an unnecessarily strict definition for line, you'll find there is almost nothing in the universe that is perfectly distinct:

There are no species, no genders, no living things, dead things, no discrete individuals, not even any discrete objects, no colors. Nothing is high, nothing is low, nothing is dark, nothing is bright; nothing is anything.

We can obviously draw a boundary between quadrupeds and bipeds -- we're doing it the second we use the words. Whether that boundary is absolute is not valuable.

The interesting question isn't "Can we argue for a continuum of awareness between insects and humans?" That part is easy.

The interesting part is, "Do we know enough about consciousness to describe a meaningful boundary between them?"