Animal Rights

I will first address my opponent's initial argument, then my opponent's rebuttal to my argument.My opponent's argumentMy opponent has listed a bunch of websites at the bottom of their argument in 'Sources', but no direct link to these sources have been made. I therefore ask you to disregard any of these sources as my opponent has not showed any correlation between the links he has provided and the claims he is presenting.Pro has explicitly stated that 'murder and torture' are crimes that animals should not be subjected to. As we are talking about all sentient animals, this means we can no longer kill flies, mosquitoes, spiders, cockcroaches, and every other animal that may not only be a pest, but may be life threatening. The world has evolved in such a way that killing is a necessary and - often - a daily process we go through. If tomorrow everyone stopped killing every sentient animal in the world, the whole world would surely collapse over the next few years."Animals can feel emotions and physical impulses. They feel pain, etcetera."Pro has failed to support this claim whatsoever and I have no reason to regard it as true. Certain animals may not have nervous systems which are capable of feeling pain, while other animals such as the earthworm to not have the psychological complexity to contain emotions, yet they are still considered sentient."By the basic human concept of ethics, they do not deserve any direct infliction of pain by humans, bound to follow these ethics by society."These ethics were only created with humans in mind, they obviously cannot encompass all animals. We are not ethically nor morally oblidged to help a mosquito by offering it our blood. Furthermore, we cannot assume all animals operate under the same ethics as us. It would be stupid to think that just because we think murder is bad, tigers and lions will stop eating meat and killing animals and turn into carnivores. These are ethics that solely apply to humans and should therefore be limited to human interactions."Humans have caused great harm and destruction to the Earth, while animals have merely helped the ecosystem balance."There is no way to seperate humans from the 'ecoystem'. We as humans are products of evolution and are therefore an integral part of the ecosystem itself. All our actions and decisions arise as a result of evolution and biological processes; we are not some sentient beings that have descended from another planet to wreck the ecosystem on earth. There is no such thing as a good or bad impact on the ecosystem, we simply function in the way that has resulted due to evolution."Animals cannot commit "crimes". What an animal does is morally justifiable as animals have a varied notion of "ethics", and do not have the psychological complexity to understand these ethical propositions."Pro just shot himself in the foot. This point clearly supports my argument that humans are inherently different to humans and should be treated as so. A spider has no notion of good or bad, it simply feels the urge to bite us, and nothing we do can change that primal instinct. It would therefore be reckless to assume they are operating under the same code of conduct or ethics as we are."Research on dogs and arthropods at the University of Lincoln showed that these animals react to stimuli by a nervous charge pattern similar to that of humans while experiencing emotions, proving that animals are capable of emotions. Thus, I conclude with the fact that animals deserve equal respect, welfare and rights, and do not deserve to be treated in cruel conditions of factory farming, slaughterhouses and laboratories that practice animal testing."This research was not sourced to anywhere that we can check at all and thus should be regarded as unreliable. Furthermore, through the application of Occam's Razor, which states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected, and Morgan's Canon, which states that "In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes, if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development", it is clear that the nervous change patterns shown in these dogs may be a simple biological reaction rather than any heightened form of emotion.It is now clear that even without addressing Pro's final round, I have already won the debate as I have refuted all of Pro's points numerous times and in all areas. For the sake of clarity however, I will address his rebuttal in the third round as well.My opponent's rebuttalThe main (and only) point made by my opponent in this round is that he said 'equal rights' rather than 'same rights'. However, I believe it would be hard to find 'equal rights' for being equal in the eyes of the law and owning property. This naturally stems from the fact that at our core, humans and other sentimental animals are innately unequal, and therefore any attempt to instill the idea of equal rights in animals would never work out. Furthermore, you would not give the 'same respect' to a baby mosquito as you would do to a baby human. You would caress a baby human, or at least try not to wake it up (or suffer the consequences), but I assume most sane and rational people would kill a baby mosquito, or a mosquito of any age for that matter.