The human-animal boundary is a modern, contested construction, not a given

Evidence

It is argued that the assumption that animals cannot have rights because they literally cannot claim their rights in a court of law is merely an arbitrary limitation in the meaning of “right”—to active right. What is required, it is said, is a radical reworking of attitudes and behaviors in which our modern concept of “the human” as the ultimately privileged being is embedded. For attempts to draw a radical separation between “human” and “animal” have been a continuous feature of modern thinking and practice. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 751