Animals can be deserving of Personhood

My opponent has made me a very sad person for making me type so much only to be ignored. However, I will take advantage of this. By refusing to debate my philosophical inquiries into animal personhood, he has unintentionally agreed to my arguments that animals are indeed deserving of personhood. His problem appears to be that, now that we've agreed that humans aren't the only beings entitled to rights, how does the implementation of these rights to non-humans affect the human world we've currently grown-up in. I will rebute his points on the 3 unalienable rights.-Life:There was a reason I wanted to keep this debate in the philosophical realm as these topics Con has brought up are large-scale in their own right. They delve into the 5 topics (as the film Earthling defined) of animal rights. I will try to answer them in a simplified yet effective manner."Are hunters, ranchers, whole industries devoted to, in the bluntest sense, the distribution and selling of lifeless animals now to be charged with murder or hate crimes?"Of course not. In the US and most of the developed world, there are ex-post facto laws in place, meaning that any crime committed before it was outlawed is unpunishable. I.e. If I litter and the next day it's made illegal to litter, I cannot be prosecuted."But now upon the acceptance of animals as individual "persons", are we obligated to protect them from industries, and in some cases themselves?"Yes we are obligated to protect them from industries. Industries have to evolve- that's how it's always worked. When slavery and child labor were outlawed, for example, those industries that relied on them (cotton, textiles respectively) changed.The same applies for all industries that rely on animals. To list a few examples, science is already providing us with in-vitro meat to replace slaughterhouses and PETA gives a whole list of better alternatives to animal testing (http://www.peta.org...).With regards to protection from themselves, that's a little shady. When we're talking about the presence of unalienable rights, we are almost definitely talking about in a society with a government in place. I'm not saying one does not have those rights in a non-governmental place, but with regards to enforcement, the rights can almost certainly be ignored. That being said, in a species natural environment/ecosystem the rules of nature play out as they are; eat or be eaten. Now of course, we do have an obligation to protect species in risk of endangerment and their said habitats. It is through this latter proposal that I believe regulated hunting can be implemented but I will not go further for fear of space.-Liberty;Con appears to be relying on a slippery-slope argument here as he is in essenence proclaiming that if we grant personhood to animals, we must grant them every available right in this world. Remember, we must be practical and logical in situations such as these, and that includes considering the limitations of personhood subjects. Take corporations for example- when the Supreme Court granted them personhood, it didn't mean they had every right that a human being had- just whatever was logical for a corporation to have (i.e. freedom of speech). Corporations did not get suffrage for instance as that was an illogical right to be given.Think the same for animals. As you pointed out, freedom from forced captivity in a zoo is a good example of a Liberty right that an animal with personhood would have. Speaking for all animal rights activists, no one is considering giving animals rights such as suffrage due to common sense.-Happiness/Property:As I stated above, we have to be practical in all situations. But in the case of property, it's interesting because when I think the right to property (in the case of animals), I'm not thinking in the captalist sense "okay, I have the right to start a business", but to rather the right to have a home. Con is right in that animals cannot own something as most do not possess the necessary levels of abstract thinking. However, we can agree here that they do in fact have a right to a home, which is where I think the justification in setting aside land for animal sanctuaries or organic farms where the animal's welfare is taken into account above the profits."The Pro should rather argue more so taking pro-action on specific animal rights as his arguments would have gone much further." As I stated above, I did not want to delve into the specific categories of animal rights as I was hoping to make a philosophical argument. Because that's where the main difference lies between animal rights and animal welfare.If I could make one small request to my opponent, and that is to keep declarations for votes away from the discussion this early. I personally have no problem with it (although I do think it's rather pointless considering we're not getting paid to win here lol), but it does seem rather unnecessary to do so in only the 2nd round.I eagerly await my opponent's rebuttal.