“if you eat meat you have no standing to care about animal rights”

Come on ... you know what I said is more nuanced that! You've got standing ... I'm talking to you about it!

And yea, I'm totally with one seeing "wrongness" in much of how humanity interacts with animals, whether they could personally do better or not.

Where we differ and maybe start talking past each other is that I think an article or incident like Neural link is a good opportunity to not just get sucked into some main stream media click baity outrage and instead think about the broader system and culture involved, where, as I've said, there's a real enough chance Musk and his company isn't especially evil but rather representative of a multiple industries.

The point about whether someone is regularly eating meat is that the meat industry is comparatively huge and something which forms a central and direct part of everyone's lives ... it's where the majority of our relationship with animal welfare begins and ends and it's the one that we can clearly think about, that we have personal stakes in and can easily investigate and do something about. Which means if you care about animal welfare, and don't want to only engage in click baity online outrage, it's the obvious place to start and have a conversation. Which, of course, isn't to take away from what may have transpired in Neuralink.

Other than all of that ... yea look, if you want to get upset about the monkeys but not even talk about the meat industry, then yea, you can have a point about the monkeys, but it'll be, IMO, a relatively easy one and it will run the risk of actually ignoring the medical/scientific progress that might maybe depending on your ethics justify at least the idea of the experiment.

I'm not rejecting it though, or the validity of your stance on it ... just trying to push for a better conversation.