You are missing the point Doug - animal rights is not about animals but about people. Or people's attitudes toward "other" forms of life, to be precise. You can either show unconditionall compassion toward those other forms, or find it justifiable to kill or use them to attain your goals - be it personal thrill or a grand-scale social engineering, in which case the question arises: where do you draw a line? who decides who is an animal or a "tiermensch" (lit. animal-man) as the nazis used to say?
wojtek