Monkeys should be considered persons

The con side"s final argument is as follows. I cannot be lead to agree with every premise of the pro side, which will be reflected in the following "con" premises. Therefore, I cannot support the conclusion that monkeys should be considered persons. 1.Pain is pain wherever it occurs. 2.Pain should be defined as something that a subject feels, whether it is an emotion or a physical sensation, when something pain inflicting occurs against them. 3.We cannot rationally ignore or dismiss the moral relevance of the pain that a person or an animal feels. 4.What is ethical is moral. 5.Ethics asked us to take care for the basic needs and legitimate expectations of others as well as our own. 6.Non-human mammals (any animal) do not have essentially the same rights not to feel pain or be harmed, though they have some rights against this. 7.Animals do not have the same rights as people, though in terms of feeling pain or being harmed there is some semblance of rights given them, though not in equality with people. 8.We do not have exactly the same duties to animals as we would have duties directly to each other. 9.The duties that we do have to animals is that we must be kind to them, and not be cruel to animals, just as we should be kind and not cruel to other people. 10.For any person to fail to respect another person"s independent value is to act immorally, by violating the individual"s rights. 11.There are rules and regulations that prevent us from harming some animals, including monkeys, which makes them to some extent moral objects. 12.Animals and people do not inherit value equally. 13.Monkeys and other animals cannot act morally/immorally, do not have the same amount of inherited value as people, and do not have the same exact rights as all people. 14.Therefore, monkeys should not be considered persons. I am lead to conclude such, because the pro premises to not necessarily indicate that monkeys must be considered persons. I found the argument very vague and hard to follow, because I could not see how just because a monkey may feel pain, and has some rights against pain and harm that people may have, that this necessarily indicates that monkeys should be considered persons. I believe that the argument given by the pro side could have been much more effective if it had considered the cognition of monkeys and their behaviors/emotions that make them comparable to people. Also, much of her argument was based on the fact that she believes that animals have the same rights as people not to be harmed or hurt or killed. However, though I believe that animals should definitely have some rights against such, to have the rights of animals completely equal with the rights of people would prevent us from eating any animal that had died intentionally. The only time we would ever have meat would be if an animal died on its own. If animals had the same rights as people, there would be no hunting, there would be no fishing, there wouldn"t be beef, chicken, turkey, veal, fish, etc. in the grocery stores. This is because people have the right not to be killed or harmed (unless in the case of death penalty/some valid cases of war), so we would have no right to kill any animals. For this reason, I think it is safe to say that it is rather illogical to say that all animals should have the same rights as people, regardless of the situation. This brings about another questions-If an animal died on its own we could eat it then, correct? However if we consider the rights most people seem to have, almost every culture has some sort of ritual that involves the dead. Though I know there may be, whether in past or present, some cultures that eat their dead, I think it is safe to say most don"t eat the dead. So if animals have the same rights as people, we would have no right to eat the dead either, unless of course we lived in a culture where the dead were normally eaten. Based on the information given in the debate, I do not think we can conclude that monkeys should be considered persons.