Should animals have the same rights as people?

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Humans put animals through hell for profit. We do that to ourselves too.

I don't believe we should give rights to animals but I think humans should have more responsibility to them, and ourselves. We should be encouraged, both by law and morality, to treat animals and each other with respect and fairness.

Animals should have rights proportional to their sentience.

Moral agents have a duty to reduce "sentient suffering".

First off, animals are not scencient. They act and behave primarily by instinct.

Second, being that they are not scencient, we have a duty and a right to protect these species from extinction. We do not, however, have the right to return the domesticated species back to the wild. Do you think that both PETA and HSUS have the good of the domesticated animal in mind? Absolutely not! Imogene Niewkirk, the founder of PETA famously made the analogy a dog is a boy is a pissant. Now you know why she is beloved by Autism Speaks!

Does that mean we have the right to abuse companion animals? HELL, NO! You abuse a defenseless animal, you are more than likely to abuse a human being!

In some extreme cases, thats debatable. Its purported that fully grown dolphins possess the intellectual powers of a 7 year old human child.

That being an extreme case, I don't think humans have any business interfering with dolphin society. They shouldn't be used for food nor medicine, and I struggle with them being used for entertainment. Its not a necessary utility. Arguably the same can be said for chimpanzees. Not just because chimps are smart, but also because they are f*****g dangerous. They can rip the face or arms off a man without breaking a sweat.

If this is the case, how do you explain the intellectual gap between a mammal and an insect? There's nothing whatsoever that make humans different from other mammals, save for the fact that our intelligence is more advanced.

Again its debatable. The point is that our intelligence is so more advanced to the point that we are operating at an entirely different paradigm from other mammals. We are the only species that has the ability to both transmit and receive radio signals which by scientific definition makes us the only intelligent species. We are the only species that can deliberately cause and start fires. We're the only species that can understand and appreciate abstract concepts like love, religion, spirituality, art and poetry (admittedly in the case of aspies that ability varies somewhat).

Actually, even dogs are capable of abstract thinking, and a chimpanzee capable of operating a lighter is also capable of starting a fire--or lighting a cigarette without starting a fire. Any mammal is capable of love (advanced creatures wouldn't be able to survive without emotions). In terms of logic, a cat is on par with a six year old (allthough it's only on par with an 18 month old in terms of language). We're operating on a different level than other mammals because our larynxes give us the ability to talk and because written language (and thus the ability to preserve culture and inventions) was invented in the middle neolithic age. 20,000 years ago, our ancestors were little more than advanced apes; there were no such thing as monogamous relationships, an educational system, technology or money.