Do animals deserve equal rights?

Personally I have problems accepting either argument. To claim that a species deserves equal rights to a human does not agree with me. I would agree that the distinction between equal rights and the same rights is an important one, however to even accord an animal equal rights is a strange concept as I believe rights to be something we accord our own species in order to function as a society and this is not something other species would be able to grasp at a rational level to follow through (except for heavily trained and bred animals like dogs). Personally I feel that people are in many ways simply animals that have developed a sense of reason, but we have always competed with other animals and killed many of them for food and for other purposes yet this has never been seen as wrong as it was competitive. Though Singer does not say this, he does bring up the topic of fairness and I feel there is an interesting way to apply it to the issue. I don’t think the issue is whether or not animals should have equal rights as humans but there is the question of whether they should have rights at all. Can we use animals as “machines that convert fodder into flesh” or as test subjects? Humans have seemingly escaped the competition with animals and it seems that it is time to decide how we should treat them. Personally I tend to agree with Wilson’s interpretation of Kant that we should treat animals with respect and kindness because otherwise we will dirty our own humanity, and to me it seems vile to be so callous that we treat animals can feel pain as machines. Modernization seems to blame for this graying of morals and the fact that we never have to see the animals that are slaughtered for us and only contribute indirectly does not help.