Animal rights versus animal welfare
The difference between animal rights and animal welfare has been summed up like this:
Animal rights advocates are campaigning for no cages, while animal welfarists are campaigning for bigger cages.
Animal rights supporters believe that it is morally wrong to use or exploit animals in any way and that human beings should not do so.
Animal welfare supporters believe that it can be morally acceptable for human beings to use or exploit animals, as long as: the suffering of the animals is either eliminated or reduced to the minimum and there is no practicable way of achieving the same end without using animals.
For people who think like this, the suffering to animals is at the heart of the issue, and reducing the suffering reduces the wrong that is done.
Supporters of animal rights don't think that doing wrong things humanely makes them any less wrong.
Animals don't need rights to deserve protection; a good moral case can made for treating them well and considering their interests that doesn't involve accepting animal rights.
The human consequences of animal rights
Accepting that non-human animals have rights requires human beings to accept that:
•non-human animals are conscious beings not machines or objects
•non-human animals have interests of their own
•human beings should respect the interests of non-human animals
•human beings should not exploit non-human animals
•human beings should not treat non-human animals as objects
•human beings should not kill non-human animals
Accepting that non-human animals have rights restricts human beings, and may even cause people to die who might otherwise have lived.
For example, it means that human beings can't use non-human animals in medical experiments - even if this restriction will lead to the death of many human beings from a disease for which a cure might be discovered through animal experimentation.