Animal Rights (2000)

I found more to disagree with in the author's conservatism which I found a bit too hard-line for my liking. But still, there's intersting points, for instance:

To use these strategies on animals is to misuse them; for if animals have rights, then they have duties too. Some of them—foxes, wolves, cats, and killer whales—would be inveterate murderers and should be permanently locked up. Almost all would be habitual law-breakers. All would deserve punishments from time to time, though maybe they could hire lawyers like Steven Wise to argue that they could not possibly be blamed, since only humans are blameworthy.

Or:

And that explains, in part, the appeal of the animal-rights movement. It shifts the focus away from moral beings toward creatures in every respect less demanding—creatures like dogs, which return our affection regardless of our merits, or cats, which maintain an amiable pretense of affection while caring for no one at all (a fact always vehemently and fruitlessly denied by their keepers). The world of animals is a world without judgment, where embarrassment, remorse, guilt, and penitence are unknown, and where human beings can escape from the burden of moral emotions. In another way, therefore, those who tell us that we have no special place in the scheme of things create a place for us that is just as special. By focusing our human attitudes on animals, we are playing at God, standing always apart from and above our victims, smiling down on their innocent ways, removed from the possibility of judgment ourselves, and, in our exaltation, imagining that we confer the greatest benefit on those whom we patronize.