this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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I believe non-human animals are people on the same level as a human and should have the same rights as humans. Eating a deer is cannibalism because it's consumption of a person's flesh.
I'm also do actually agree that large industrial meat production is a worse thing than subsistence hunting and small-scale agriculture. I know the difference and yeah, one is preferable to the other. Unfortunate realities are better than mass exploitative death. I'm still a vegan though and believe in promoting non-human personhood and all the legal rights that comes with.
Not sure how you'd manage that logistically because plenty of animals do not have societies anything like the way that humans do and can't be communicated with like equals via spoken or written language, with only minor successes at times in figuring out ways to communicate with them. There are domesticated animals that can be trained to respond to keywords, but I wouldn't call that a conversation.
So as far as I can tell, we're either looking at major advances in science to be able to communicate with non-human animals, at which point the form of communication and the way they perceive the world may still be very alien to us and hard to contextualize in our societies, or we're looking at anthropomorphizing things about them that aren't human, which is a problem in its own way as it presumes that surface level appearance of human-like traits are deriving from the same basis as that of humans. And anthro'izing is not the same as respecting as a unique species. It's saying "you must be doing this because [it reminds me of something I'd do]." It also means creating some pretty arbitrary lines as to what constitutes intelligent enough life to be deserving of these "rights". Else-wise we can end up with somebody going to prison for killing ants in their home, which I would hope you agree would be an absurd end result of pursuing such rights.
To reiterate though, I would agree that animals should not be mistreated, like as in factory farming. That is a concrete issue with well documented problems and can be actioned upon in a way that this abstraction about rights and personhood cannot be actioned upon.
When I say afford animals the same legal rights as a human I do seriously mean it in that way. If a human attacks you, then yeah you defend yourself. If ants are in your home without being invited, then yes you get them to leave and if that fails you use violence. You'd do the same with a human. I'm a vegan, not a pacifist. And if a legal group wants to represent the ants and say they have squatters' rights then I actually think that would be kinda fun and we should have those discussions.
I don't know what level of communication is really necessary to say non-human animals deserve human rights. There are nonverbal humans and they still have full legal rights despite not being capable of communicating.
Like a coworker of mine once asked if since I believe animals are people, if a duck should be allowed to drive a car. And I replied that if a duck is able to pass a driving test and line up at the DMV to get a license, then yeah let that duck drive. Same as any other person. I'll give any duck who learns how to drive a 1994 Toyota corolla.
I think that'd be a sure way to worsen the reputation of vegans and make mockery of concerns about things like factory farming.
Nonverbal humans can learn other ways to communicate (such as sign) and they are born human, so it's easy to understand them as belonging to the human species and thus deserving of the same rights. It's a world of difference between that and trying to understand why any given non-human species does what it does, how it perceives the world, and so on.