Tom Regan has carefully dealt with ethical dilemmas concerning the eating of meat. He concluded that eating meat is wrong because it denies life to animals in the absence of overriding moral action. Although there is a certain validity and soundness to his argument, it contains flaws that invite it to be contested. Regan's fusing together of humans and animals has been previously questioned, and his counterarguments are imperfect, leaving room for his primary view to be attacked.
Regan states that denying life to either humans or non-human animals is wrong in the absence of overriding moral consideration. Eating meat, logically, denies life to animals. Regan also states that there is no overriding moral consideration that justifies eating meat. Therefore, he claims that eating meat is wrong.
In the argument, humans and all other animals are grouped together as one. Regan does this because he believes that there is no clear moral distinction between humans and other animals. There are many biological and characteristic distinctions that can be made between humans and other animals, such as the level of intelligence, but it would be difficult to decide where the line must be drawn between them. Certain animals, such as dolphins, possess intelligence and communicative skills similar to those of humans. Since there is not enough of a difference between humans and dolphins, we would likely need to grant them similar rights. The ranking of animals by means of a purely biological distinction would be based upon pure bias rather than reason, and therefore could not be employed. .
If we consider factors like the faculties of reason, speech, problem solving, and free will, we may be able to draw a line between humans and other animals, but there are problems with that distinction. It could be argued that some species of animals do possess those mentioned traits, such as with the dolphin, the beaver that builds his dam, or the ape that develops a system of spoken communicative symbols with other primates.