system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is it OK to kill a hundreds of bugs/insects but not OK for "bigger" animals?

A life is a life, right? Why is an ant's life more valuable than a bird or (sorry, Reddit) cat?
gpt
Because that's how society is. Why is it not okay to eat a dog (in America), but it's okay to eat a cow?

Now, there are some "objective" ways that you can judge whether treatment of some animal is cruel or not. A lot of people have decided that it's okay to kill certain animals based on how intelligent they are. So, it's okay to kill an ant because it's stupid and inconsequential on its own, whereas a cow is reasonably intelligent, can feel pain, can suffer, all that stuff.

It's also not totally clear whether or how some animals feel pain or not, so some people try to justify it that way (you'll hear that from people who only eat fish a lot, for example).

Really, though, it's just a societal thing. It's really hard to come up with an objective reason for why we do these things, and if you can, it's usually just a rationalization for something we'd be doing whether we could justify it or not.