Animal rights advocates often contrast humanity’s dismal treatment of animals farmed for food with our adoration bordering on worship of pet cats and dogs — the point being that these distinctions between animals that are equally sentient are arbitrary, hypocritical, and pointlessly cruel.

The comparison makes an important point, but it also conceals a grimmer reality: Humans treat the animals that we categorize as beloved companions horribly, too, breeding millions of them in puppy mills and even experimenting on tens of thousands of them every year in labs. And that in turn reveals something more fundamental about our relationship to animals. Whether they’re chickens, pigs, or dogs, the problem is the same: Nonhuman animals are commodities with no rights and few legal limits on what can

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