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Stephen Budiansky, the former Washington editor of Nature and currently a correspondent for The Atlantic, is author of the recently published book, If A Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness, which attacks the animal rights' views of animal intelligence and consciousness.
In a December interview published on The Atlantic's web site, Atlantic Unbound, Budiansky tells interviewer Katie Bacon,
One of the reasons I fundamentally disagree with the animal-rights philosophy is that it seems to be based on the notion that pain is the overriding factor in determining whether an animal has rights … The idea that because animals can suffer pain they therefore deserve equal consideration is a very limited view of the world. And even more than that, sentience or consciousness is not the same as a moral capacity, a capacity to anticipate the future, a capacity to have thoughts about thoughts, a capacity to have an awareness of oneself as an independent moral agent. These are things that result in different experiences of the world, and I think they make it perfectly valid and normal to make distinctions between us and other animals.
Budiansky complains that in the animal rights movement, "there’s a wholesale misrepresentation of what biomedical research is for and what it’s about. There are a lot of misrepresentations of animal agriculture, too."
What really concerns Budiansky, however, is the "sentimental anthropomorphizing" that seems so common among animal rights groups and activists (although Budiansky concedes such anthropomorphizing is a "highly adaptive trait" that clearly serves some important functions for a highly social species such as ourselves).
Source:
The animal point of view. Stephen Budiansky, Atlantic Unbound, December 9, 1998.