An animal's life is worth just as much as a human's.

I think this debate would go better if Pro had explained what he meant by a life having "worth" in his opening. I took him to mean something like intrinsic worth, and I expected him to argue that killing an animal is just as immoral as killing a human.But now it appears that he was talking, not about intrinsic worth, but instrumental worth. Instrumental worth is the relative worth something or someone has depending on how useful or appreciated they are.That creates some ambiguity with the resolution. If he means to say that all dogs and cats are worth as much as all humans, then his resolution is false. After all, not even every dog has equal worth. Some dogs are useless and some are very helpful. The same is true with humans.If he means that there is at least one dog out there who has the same intrinsic worth of at least one human out there, then I'd have to concede the debate. I'm not going to concede it just yet because I'm not sure what his original intent was.Here's anotherh difficulty with his resolution and his defense. Let's say there's a drug sniffing dog who is really good at what he does. In that case, the dog would have a lot of worth to the police officers who use him to catch criminal. But that dog wouldn't be worth a hill of beans to the criminals who don't want to be caught! So the same dog can be both very worthy and completely unworthy depending on who you ask. There's no objective truth to the quesiton of worth the dog has any worth. It's relative to the people who value them or don't value them.That's the nature of instrumental worth. The same dog or human can have a great deal of instrumental worth to one person but no worth at all to another person. Instrumental worth is necessarily a relative or subjective thing. There can't be any such thing as objective instrumental worth.So if pro means to say that objectively an animal's life is worth just as much as a human's, his resolution can't possibly be true. If he means to make a relative claim, as he should, then how will you judge the debate? There's no right or wrong answer. To him, dogs may have the same instrumental worth as humans, and to me they don't.But let's suppose that what he means is that when you compare how instrumentally worthy dogs and cats have been to humans to how instrumentally worthy humans have been to each other, they are about equal. Given how he argued, that seems to be what he meant.I question whether it's true, though. I grant that dogs and cats have had a great deal of instrumental worth to various people, but what evidence is there that they have had just as much instrumental worth as humans have had to each other. It seems to me that under this understanding of the resolution, humans have far greater instrumental worth than dogs and cats for the following reasons:1. We typically love our brothers, sisters, children, and parents more than we love our pets.2. Almost all of us have friends and family, but not all of us have pets.3. While a dog can provide protection from time to time, humans are more reliable and effective in that regard. Even police dogs would be utterly useless without the guidence of their human masters. Far more humans have died defending their country than dogs or cats.4. Humans bring much more to a relationship than dogs or cats. If you marry a human, you can share the chores, have deep and intimate conversations, procreate, and take them with you pretty much anywhere without having to pick up their poop.In the next round, I hope that Pro will explain to us very clearly what he means by the resolution, taking account of all the different ways it could be interpreted.Thank you.