A Hunter and His Prey

[Marko]

@Leviathan

Human infants and the severely mentally disabled are acknowledged to possess “rights” in regard to their intuitive interests in the avoidance of suffering (primarily in the realm of physical pain), and since various nonhuman animals possess awareness and sentience levels that rival or exceed those of those groups, it is onlyarbitrary speciesism that excludes them from having rights.

…

As mentioned, their incapacity to understand the concept of rights isn’t a justification for a deprivation of them, just as a mentally disabled human striking another without comprehension as to the violation of the NAP that it involved is not a justification for striking him or permitting violent abuse and slaughter of the mentally disabled.

It is only speciesism and double standard it we were to claim that only those individual animals which have capacity to reason have rights. Instead I would say that if of a certain specie only a single individual animal would demonstrate the ability to reason that then we would concede that this specie is not an animal specie and that therefore all the members of this specie have certain rights not just this single creature.