Once you start down the road of pretending that animals are humans, there is only one other alternative, extermination of humans. So its all madness, clearly animals are not humans, no more than soy beans and lettuces are humans. The only people who don't understand this are people who have been brought up without any contact with animals, except as pets. People who live in cities, people who believe, in their heart of hearts, that cartoon animals as realistic depictions of the personalities and feelings of actual animals.
[WS:] I am generally with you on this, however, I have the following issues:
1. As a matter of fact, animals are like humans - they are all mammals with brains and nervous systems of varying complexity yet functioning in similar ways, which makes them feel pretty much similar things, within a certain range, of course. I think that what you are really objecting to is extending the idea that humans are somehow "special" - e.g. have an immortal soul that connects them with the divine etc. - to animals. My position is that the idea of human exceptionalism with all its spiritual appendages is rubbish to begin with, whether it is extended to animals or not. So objecting to that extension is really missing the point.
2. While I agree with you that nature is a brutal place where killing is the norm, it is also true that avoidance of aversive stimuli is also a natural reaction. Therefore, I do not object to killing of either animals or humans in principle. In fact I think that human killing of animals (or other humans) generally causes less suffering to the killed than most of the killings that occur in the state of nature.
Having said that, however, observing an act of killing is quite an unpleasant experience to me, therefore, I am trying to avoid it. I also suspect that many so called "people who live in cities" feel the same way, hence their visceral opposition to killing, both animals and humans. So for these people it is really a balancing act between being realistic and simply accepting the state of nature, and avoidance of aversive stimuli and feelings. How that balance is resolved depends not as much on having or not having contact with animals, but on emotional constitution of a person. Some people are more thin-skinned than other.
Wojtek