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> intelligent

Not enough to matter, if at all, because they still can only qualify as ...

> animals

... and therefore are not due even vaguely similar rights/considerations as people.

That's a strawman argument. Pigs and cattle having the same rights as people is not why it is unethical to torture and eat them. Instead, it is because their behavior and nervous systems strongly suggest that they experience pain in the way that we understand it. Claiming that their non-humanness makes their suffering irrelevant, like some people do, is narrow-minded.

> Instead, it is because their behavior and nervous systems strongly suggest that they experience pain in the way that we understand it.

"People are always means not ends.", albeit a very false sentence, is a good-enough approximation of how we interact as peers. Animals that do not qualify as people, do not fall within this model. Their needs, wants and pains are irrelevant except to the extent that others' ends make them relevant; and they lack the ability and agency to act with reciprocity towards us as we do to ourselves.

> narrow-minded

Why, thank you!

Brutal reductionism is indeed a most beautiful instrument of cognitive efficiency and brevity.

Sorry, I got that quote backwards, it should have read "People are always ends not means.".

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