Some people who criticize the animal rights cause, possibly mistake any definition of animal rights by activists with the cause itself.

(The cause comprises activism but is built on subjectives pertaining to animal autonomy: the problematic and complex relation of human society towards nonhuman animals, nonhuman animals by themselves, the context of animals and nature.)

Aditionally, if AR activists are ignorant of human rights violations, it doesn’t mean that their animal rights activism is fully informed either. Speciesism is a complex issue and if animal rights activists get something wrong about how speciecism works in society, then nobody will even notice.

When a human rights activist gets something wrong about what is best for humans we might not even notice that either, but obviously that happens for other reasons.

In the case of our insensitivity to animal issues it’s the remoteness to the world animals have been relegated to by speciesist terms of religion, philosophy, natural sciences (in a sometimes undetected yet so obvious way), culture foremostly.

Our ignorance in the field of human rights or our blindness to causes of injustice amongst people stems probably from disinformedness, a lack of freedom possibly, opportunism maybe, adherence to scholarly doctrine, elitism … I believe.

However back to where I came from: to assume that the cause of animal rights can be equalized with animal rights activism automatically, ignores the fact of how uninformed we all are yet of how speciesism and nonhuman animal objectification works. The atrocities done to the animal world are on a level that can’t be compared.

And to close this thought: Dedicating ones efforts to animal causes doesn’t necessarily mean that one takes a posthumanist stance where we all beings are “one” in a sense. Evolutionary there undoubtedly is a continuity, but on a cultural level it can be rather the interest in animals as “coexistent living and sensitive beings”.