When the topic of "animal rights" comes up here on Sb, it is often in the unfortunate context of a recent terrorist attack on a lab or researcher's home. These events are deplorable, but we should take care to remember that it was not that long ago that cruelty to animals, in the colleges and in public, was a regular thing.
In an interview held on WHYY's Radio Times held earlier this year, host Marty Moss-Coane discussed the treatment of animals during the "long 18th century" with author Kathryn Shevelow, whose book For the Love of Animals covered just that topic. You can listen to the interview at the Radio Times website here (requires Real Audio).
Animal cruelty persists to this day, of course. There are high-profile cases like Michael Vick's disgusting dog-fighting habit, but there are many abuses that we don't often hear about. I deal with these issues almost every day. Many of the cats my wife and I have taken in have either been abandoned, abused, or on death row for no reason other than that they were unwanted.
Of great public interest, though, has been the proposed ban on experimentation on great apes that has come up before the European Commission. This is largely symbolic as tortuous experimentation has not been carried out on apes in Europe for about 6 years, but it is still heartening (now if we could get a similar ban elsewhere, like the U.S. for example...). The question of a ban of experiments on anthropoids (monkeys), though, will undoubtedly become much more heated.
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I've always found it a natural extension of my scientific interest in and love of nature and the biosphere to also be against most animal experimentation. I sympathize to a great extent with the animal rights activists so often lambasted on scienceblogs. I even understand the motivations of some of those who resort to violence. It's especially bad that the trade in animals for experimentation has become a business. Those who make money off of it will promote use of animal experimentation even where it's unnecessary.
Sociobiologists will have a field-day when they see that first photo of a gorilla clearly exhibiting primitive prayer technique.
The problem here is, humans are utterly, utterly crap at taking a good idea and going only as far as needed with it. The idea that animals are living creatures, capable of pain and emotion, and which ought to be treated with care and a modicum of respect even when we are blatantly using and killing them for our own purposes, is a very good idea. But we do not and will not stop at this moderation, however...oh, no, we end up with things like the Swiss law forbidding "offending the dignity of plants." See, we have to take every good idea, and run with it to the extreme of it being a really, really BAD idea, once again.
Happy mediums? Humans as a species so don't do those...