They are intended as suggestions and as a source of ideas when formulating your own responses. We recommend that you do not try to memorize and repeat these, but rather, incorporate them into your own comments. Animal welfare theories accept that animals have interests but allow these interests to be traded away as long as there are some human benefits that are thought to justify that sacrifice. Animal rights means that animals, like humans, have interests that cannot be sacrificed or traded away just because it might benefit others. Animal rights means that animals are not ours to use for food, clothing, entertainment, or experimentation.
Animals have the right to equal consideration of their interests.
For instance, a dog most certainly has an interest in not having pain inflicted on him or her unnecessarily. However, animals don't always have the same rights as humans, because their interests are not always the same as ours and some rights would be irrelevant to animals' lives. For instance, a dog doesn't have an interest in voting and therefore doesn't have the right to vote, since that right would be as meaningless to a dog as it is to a child. We can't stop all suffering, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop any. There is currently no reason to believe that plants experience pain, devoid as they are of central nervous systems, nerve endings, and brains.