Animals don’t reason, don’t understand rights, and don’t always respect our rights, so why should we apply our ideas of morality to them?

An animal’s inability to understand and adhere to our rules is as irrelevant as a child’s or a person with a developmental disability’s inability to do so. Like small children, most animals are not capable of choosing to change their behavior, but adult human beings have the intelligence to choose between behavior that hurts others and behavior that doesn’t.