I must admit that I didn't follow much of Mr. Saletan's argument; it seemed somewhat confused to me. Is there actually an argument there? Does Mr. Saletan suggest that the animal rights movement's objectives are not exemplified by the Great Apes Project because it allows for moral discrimination between the great apes and other sentient animals?

If so, that certainly does not follow. It is a sad fact that the ideal of equality is very poorly understood even amongst educated persons; in particular, people generally fail to recognise that treating individuals or entities as equals does not entail treating them equally.

Thus, Singer can say that all animals are equal without making the outrageous claim that all animals are to be treated equally. In the scheme of things, to say that all animals are equal is to say something such as that their well-being counts equally in the moral balance, or, most simply, that one cannot justify unequal treatment amongst members of different species purely on the grounds of species-difference. Morally significant characteristics are those that can legitimately justify discrimination. Similarly, it is a morally relevant difference between myself and a child in the Third World that they are in much greater need than myself, and this fact can legitimise diverting greater resources to such children from a (hypothetical) portion of unowned resources than I might receive. With respect to animals and humans, the rights one will be accorded (and the strength of those rights) depend upon one's characteristics: dogs don't have a right to vote, because they have no interest in such a right, nor any meaningful way of exercising it, but they do have a right not to be killed or tortured. And so on, I would say, for just about any animal that is currently killed for human gustatory pleasure...but that is a longer story.