"For four hundred years we’ve seen this constant widening of the circle of ethical concern: first black people become ‘people’ – and claimed the rights that are assigned to ‘people’ – then women, then the variously disabled, and the sexually ‘deviant’. It doesn’t seem at all unlikely to me that two hundred years from now – if we make it that far! – the current arrangement of relationships between animals and humans will be considered a kind of monstrosity."

Zadie Smith, on the heels of the recent Cambridge declaration of animal consciousness (via explore-blog)