Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>>
> There are no "formal" or "objective" terms that compel a person to
> draw the line between living things deserving of respect and not
> deserving of respect where you and Singer do; as far as I can tell,
> it's an arbitrary decision based on common sense ideas about cruelty
> and suffering.
I think it was Hannah Arendt who argued that there was a conflict between "life" and "human life," and that a tendency to value the former corresponded to a tendency to disvalue the latter. I remember the following vaguely, and it was from a source hostile to Singer, but I understand he once declared that there was a difficult contradiction posed by the danger rats posed to infant life in the ghetto, since both rats & infants had moral rights!
Be that as it may, I would argue that _until_ we can begin to radically reduce human pain and suffering, animal rights (as a political issue) should figure importantly only in those cases where the protection of animal rights coincides with the furtherance of the struggle against human pain and suffering. (This is a political judgment, and I'm not going to engage in the debate of whether or not it is immoral for an individual to profit from animal pain. I distrust such moral debates in general and on principle, since I believe their only practical effect is to clutter the intellect.) Factory farming both generates animal suffering _and_ (under the conditions of capitalism) is socially undesirable. Mistreatment of pets brutalizes the humans that engage in it, which is politically undesirable; just as bad, failure to control such brutality gives aid and comfort to reactionary organizations such as PETA.
These arguments are off the top of my head and probably there are lots of holes to punch in them, but I have other things to think about than developing a nuanced position on this issue. When I read it I did find Cockburn's NLR article on it highly persuasive, but that was several years ago & I don't remember much about the article.
Carrol