The folly of animal rights

This from Adam Gopnik's article "Dog Story" (The New Yorker, 8 August 2011):

The trouble with arguments for treating animals as equals is that the language of rights and responsibility implies, above all, reciprocity. We believe it to be wrong for whites to take blacks as slaves, and wrong for blacks to enslave whites. Yet animals themselves are far crueller to other animals in the wild than we are to them in civilization; though we may believe it to be unethical for us to torment a lion, few would say it is unethical for the lion to torment the gazelle. To use the language of oppression on behalf of creatures that in their natures must be free to oppress others is surely to be using the wrong moral language. A language of compassion is the right one: we should not be cruel to lions because they suffer pain. We don't prevent the lion from eating the gazelle because we recognize that he is, in the fine old-fashioned term, a dumb animal—not one capable of reasoning about effect, or really altering his behaviour on ethical grounds, and therefore not rightly covered by the language of rights.

Gopnik is writing about dogs, but his digression illustrates the absurdity of considering animals and humans on the same moral plane. Compassion ought to be a prerequisite for any interaction; rights, on the other hand, were conceived of and implemented by humans, and should be restricted to rational beings. To think otherwise is to diminish reason; jettison logic. Since rights are exclusively the product of reason and logic, casting a wide net effectively undermines their importance. Creatures great and small cannot be assessed against a scale of which they cannot conceive.

Bentham's utilitarianism makes no such distinction. Mammals are, I think everyone can agree, capable of feeling pleasure and pain. These impulses might be rudimentary, but they are certainly present. Similarly, no one can reasonably deny that Gopnik's lion experiences and inflicts pain; thinking otherwise would be preposterous. Few people would suggest that the lion inflicts pain because he wants to. The obvious answer is that he does what he has to – what he is hardwired to do. Humans, on the other hand, possessed of reason and burdened by consciousness, can choose to override whatever remnants of instinct remain. The only limit imposed on our moral expression is the need for reciprocity. The lion deserves our compassion, but he cannot be encompassed by our rights because he cannot return the favour.