One thing I've noticed when I talk to people about animal rights is that their response is usually a variation of this idea: humans have the right to use animals for our benefit, and anyone who disagrees is crazy. After all, it's just a cow — right?

If you also have this opinion, I have a counterargument that may change the way you think about animals, human and not.

We are certainly more able than most animals; opposable thumbs, highly intelligent, highly social creatures. It was pretty easy for our species to take over the world and put ourselves at the top of every food chain. This also gives us a power that is easy to abuse. In our own societies, it is considered immoral to take advantage of other people just because they are weaker, less intelligent, or disabled. But again, this is only considered immoral to do to other humans.

Why do we only extend this moral courtesy to humans, meanwhile we do the opposite for most other species?

Perhaps we extend such a moral concept to animals like dogs and cats, but there is no basis for giving dogs and cats more special treatment than chickens and cows — besides the fact that we decided arbitrarily thousands of years ago that dogs and cats were for friendship and chickens and cows were for dinner.

So what kind of treatment do all animals deserve?

I'm not advocating for pigs to have a pension or the right to own property, as some people joke about. All I'm saying is this: no animal deserves to be treated like garbage, or even just some meal that hasn't been killed and cooked yet. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to eat meat or go to a pet breeder, but please take a moment to Google the conditions these animals are put through, and imagine it was your dog instead of a chicken. Better yet, imagine it's a human.

We're all different species of animal, but we ALL have emotions, relationships, compassion; human or not, animals have needs, and we don't have to deprive them of such needs just because we can.