"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the
animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are
not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
--Henry Beston

"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: In their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplify the most extreme racist theories the principle that might is right."
--Isaac Bashevis Singer

Also, check out Earthlings at Google Video. It's about humankind's dependence on animals for food, clothing, entertainment, pets and research. It left me thoroughly disturbed. I may not be well-educated but at least I'm well-informed.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in
the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage
far.The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us
little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up
such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that
we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into
the peace and safety of a new dark age.
--HP Lovecraft