For example, Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) ostensibly endorses a rights position and ultimately seeks the abolition of animal exploitation, but she argues that 'total victory, like checkmate, cannot be achieved in one move,' and that we must endorse the moral orthodoxy of animal welfare as involving necessary 'steps in the direction' of animal rights. Instead, these advocates support the pursuit of incremental welfarist reform as a 'realistic' means of reducing suffering and eventually achieving abolition. These animal advocates express concern that rights theory demands the immediate abolition of animal exploitation, and that immediate abolition is simply unrealistic. In the past five or so years, an increasing number of animal advocates have eschewed rights theory for precisely the reason that rights theory is supposedly incapable of providing determinate normative guidance. Singer's views about the nature of rights theory have had a profound impact on the animal rights movement.

According to Singer, 'he classical utilitarian regards an action as right if it produces as much or more of an increase in the happiness of all affected by it than any alternative action, and wrong if it does not.' He argues that utilitarianism does not start with rules but with goals and thus has greater normative specificity because actions are prescribed or proscribed based on 'the extent to which they further these goals.' Utilitarianism, Singer argues, is 'untouched by the complexities' required to make deontological moral theories-including rights theory-applicable in concrete moral situations.

In Practical Ethics, Peter Singer argues that ethics is not 'an ideal system which is all very noble in theory but no good in practice.' Singer identifies deontological approaches, such as rights approaches, to ethics as impractical and as having to 'rescue' themselves from their inapplicability to real-world moral issues through the introduction of 'complexities' such as formulating very detailed rules or establishing ranking structures for rules. In this article, Professor Francione compares animal rights with utilitarianism, discussing the pros and cons of each This is the view espoused by Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation.

Another, competing, basis is based on the theory of utilitarianism – the outright rejection of rights for all species and instead advocacy for equal consideration. Animal “rights” is of course not the only philosophical basis for extending legal protections to animals.

Animal Liberation by Peter Singer