[card_zero]

Jeremy Bentham popularized animal rights before the Victorian era. His well-known line was "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?".

This was at the same time part of an argument against (human) slavery. "The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs ..."

Quite apart from the suffering being a supposition (essentially based on the "duck test"), this leaves unaddressed the question of why the ability to suffer should confer rights. Elsewhere he makes the point that adult animals have more morality than similarly aged humans (toddlers), which is at least in the same ballpark as the idea of rights. But I don't think we even know why we grant creatures rights.

[guappa]

Ancient romans were already conscious about not killing species off to not make them extinct.