Someone who does believe in animal rights:

To determine if animals are subjects of rights, it’s necessary to first ask why we
have rights as human beings, we are all also animals, are physical differences what
classify me as a person with rights or as a superior being?
Racists are people who think that members of their race are superior to members
of other races simply because the former belongs to something superior to their
race. Sexists believe that members of their own sex are superior to members of the
opposite sex simply because the former belongs to a superior sex. Both racism and
sexism are totally intolerant. Racial and sexual differences are biological, they are
not moral differences.
The same should apply to animals, right? The view that members of the Homo
sapiens species are superior to members of other species simply because human
beings belong to their own superior species, would not be the same? Since there
are no higher species, thinking otherwise implies being no less critical than a racist
or a sexist.
Human beings are supposed to be rational and conscious beings and it’s not
rational to arbitrarily discriminate. And discrimination against animals is just
arbitrary. It is wrong to treat the weakest human beings, especially those whose
mental coefficient is lower than what is considered kind of normal, as "tools" or
"renewable resources" or "models" or "goods". It just cannot be correct, therefore,
to treat other animals as if they were "tools", "models" and similar things, if their
intellect is a little less than, equal to or even higher than the intellect of humans,
it's not coherent.
A human life demands feelings of empathy and compassion for the victims of
injustice, be they human or other animals. The philosophy of animal rights
promotes the growth of the virtue of compassion, people are sentient beings, we
feel love, sadness, pain, animals do not feel the same?
Rights in general demand a commitment to serve those who are weak and
vulnerable, those who, be they humans or other animals, lack the ability to speak
and defend themselves, and who are in need of protection against human greed
and the harshness, the fact that animals don’t have the material and legal capacity
to fight their rights doesn’t mean that they should be left aside. What is
characteristic of a right is not that its owner can claim it, is that some subject with
legal capacity (in this case humans) can do that for the benefit of the other and
help it.
Thinking of animals as subjects of rights is not something that should surprise us,
humans should stop thinking that we are the monarch species in this world, the
superior being, and understand that in the end, we are all animals, and that the
differences between them and us are just natural. However, those differences
should not be an excuse for us to abuse and assault animals, because they are
“weaker”.
Finally, it is necessary to understand that animals are in this world for their own
reasons; that is, they are not living for us, they are living with us.