How do you know that a cat has no concept of suffering or morals?
Because they're cats. Morals are a human concept... cats don't have the intelligence, or the thought, to come up with things like ethics and morals.
And how do you know animals aren't the same.
They are clearly not because most animals are cognitively limited.
it's an odd argument you make. You don't care for the rat and you don't care that it dies unnaturally, but you do care if its death is painful. It's a rather odd tangent to get upset about.
How's it odd?
I don't disagree with killing animals... sometimes it is a necessity to do so. But not in this method. Certainly not for pleasure either. How is being against, and upset with such disgusting behaviour an "odd tangent" ?
status shouldn't matter? There's a food chain and every animal has its place either above or below other animals. Status, whether you like it or not does matter, because its nature.
This has nothing to do with the "food chain" or "nature". You're making a naturalistic fallacy argument. Just because animals do stuff to each other in the wild doesn't mean it's acceptable for humans to do the same.
so this torture is sadistic but the purposeful use of chemicals to kill them is not, simply because the animal dies quickly.
People don't usually use chemicals just to get sadistic pleasure. They usually don't have a choice, and it's usually done to preserve health and to protect property. Unlike boiling something to death and laughing about it.
Do you think naepalm use was also acceptable on people?
No.
I get that the act itself is cruel, but you can't get on your high horse about one animals death and turn a blind eye to a multitude of other animal deaths that mostly are just as cruel, if not moreso, but the resultant death of the animal is much quicker.
I certainly can. You can't put non-human animals to the same standard as human beings because an animal like a cat is very limited cognitively.
Essentially any unncessary and unnatural death of an animal could be considered cruel.
Fox baits are cruel
rat poison is cruel
whipping a horse in a race is cruel
mulesing lambs is cruel
any form of livestock slaughter is cruel (including halal)
I just find it odd that you:
Don't care about the rat
Don't care that the rat died
Care immensely that the rat was tortured
that process makes no sense.
Why wouldn't it make any sense? It's a psychopath/potential violent individual we're talking about here... I don't wish for such people to move onto bigger targets.
Let's be realistic here; we can't avoid cruelty entirely. A lot of the things we do will attribute to an animal dying. But there is a massive, massive difference between say, building a house and displacing the animals on that land, or killing an animal humanely for meat, to trapping an animal in a cage and using an incredibly painful means to kill it just for a laugh.
I find it even more odd that you can't seem to make the distinction between this and the points you listed. Not all cruelty is the same.