You’re absolutely right1 Who would have thought thousands of people in California would be out of work over the Delta Smelt!
We lost it when we forgot why we have animal cruelty laws.
Yes, people love animals, and feel bad when they think animals are suffering.
But the purpose of animal cruelty laws is to control human cruelty, not protect animals. Because we know that people who are gratuitously cruel to animals will also be cruel to their fellow human beings. SO we want to teach kids it is wrong to torture animals.
Nowadays, it’s all about keeping the animals safe, but that makes little sense given that we put them to sleep, we eat them, we let them run around the neighborhood and get run over by cars, we use them for drug and other tests.
These are not gratuitous uses, and under the original intent nobody would ask for more than that those activities be done in a “humane” way, minimizing the harm to the animals to what is necessary for the task.
But now we are actually worried about what the animals are “going through”, and about their “suffering”.