Thanks for your comment. I really appreciate it.

What you did here (from my perspective) was to overtly signal your moral superiority to the rest of us, in a context that wasn't devoted to this discussion.

It was not my intention to signal my moral superiority to members of this community, many of whom I highly respect both morally and intellectually. Instead, I wanted to reflect on the fact that "even a community built around the goal of overcoming bias--and composed of members abnormally smart and truth-oriented--can be quite blatantly biased towards certain classes of beings," as I put it in a rejoinder to the original comment. I fully endorse what Kazuo Thow said in a (sympathetic) comment to David Pearce's Facebook wall:

Rather than taking this as an opportunity to feel like I'm better than much of the LW community, I'll instead reflect on ways that I could be doing that same kind of compartmentalization. Because if a whole community of people dedicated to rationality and self-improvement are suffering a belief-propagation-fail of that magnitude, I'm almost certainly missing something of comparable importance.

Of course, none of this was present in my original comment, so although I still believe a charitable reading of it should not have elicited such a hostile reaction, I am aware that I made things easier for those antecedently disinclined to reconsider their attitudes to non-human beings, by giving them an opportunity to dismiss my comments as coming from a self-righteous prig.