Defining sapience just off of humans is problematic to me, especially if you're using that as a hard cutoff, below which you literally don't care about their suffering at all. What makes us special? There's nothing in particular, we just happen to have quite large brains and developed a lot of things as a result. There's no reason to believe that we're the most intelligent possible animal, or that anything below us is fundamentally different.
I firmly believe in "humanity first". I believe the ultimate goal of humanity is to first put as much of Earth's nature under control (don't destroy it), then spread to other planets and colonize them, then repeat. Caring much about nonsapients kind of goes in the way of that. We are the most advanced animal on Earth, thus we are superior to every other Earth species.
I actually have a similar philosophy.
Because if we try to limit ourselves to not harming sapients. Partly because we can't just arbitrarily decide something is or is not sapient. We would need to have a way to truly communicate with them, or prove the impossibility of it to know for sure. For example, it is possible that wolves are. They might have culture. We would just not know it.
So adhering to the "no hurting sapients" rule would harm humans. A lot. What if mice are sapient? But they are also actively harmful.
Flies probably are not sapient, but ant colonies
could be.
To truly obey such a rule, we would have to refrain from harming anything that we do not know for sure is
not sapient. Otherwise we could be harming a sapient creature for what it is.
So yes, we should care about two things:
A) Do not harm and prevent harm to those we care about.
B) Do not do unnescessary harm to anyone else.
(And because of
The Golden Rule, harming humans for short term gain is usually harmful to us as well, be it from legal punishment, or setting a bad precedens.)