Wartime

I don't know when it came into my mind, but anytime I made the perception "Wait, you see what kind of animals these people often deal with? How they treat them?". Often enough they deal with animals which have some sort of higher intelligence, comparable to humans. Those which are likely to react to them and not ignore them by natural instinct. Say, I never heard about a campaign which claims "Don't throw living grasshoppers into the pan in Asia!" And those kind of animals also are not the likeliest kind to cause jumps from joy when seeing them. I'm not sure if all animals rights advocates keep silent if they find bugs close to them. But they're animals too.
What is different with them is what you find when looking at animals the rights advocates often engage for: Besides not looking pretty and "sweet", they can't be controlled and they don't respond to you. They don't talk to you or communicate in another way which a human is able to understand, and they have their own will. They follow what they want to follow.
That's all different with cats, dogs or pigs.
It wouldn't be the first and the last time people try to humanize animals just for the sake because they don't get along with fellow humans or surrender to some strange idea in their heads to try to create someone they can communicate with which is smaller or dependent on them. (Something similar happens when human children are born only because their parents want someone to cherish them.)