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I'd recommend reading 'Practical Ethics' by Peter Singer. It is very helpful on the matter of 'speciesism',

I think Peter Singer is a utilitarian, and he assumes that ultimately morality must be based on the interests of sentient beings, such as the need to avoid pain, which all sentient beings share.

When you look at things this way, then you could say "species" is an irrelevant factor morally. All sentient beings deserve to have their interests taken into consideration, although not all of them have the same set of interests.

So you could say that "speciesism" is like "racism" and "sexism" in that you are privileging the interests of certain individuals over those of others simply because of what species they belong to.

On the other hand, you could say that "racism" and "sexism" are wrong because there is no essential or significant difference between two humans just because they have different racial characteristics or are of different sexes, whereas there are relevant differences between humans and other animals. Animals don't have the same rights because they don't qualify as persons etc.

But people have argued in the past that there is some essential, relevant difference between, say, black people and white people or men and women. That's why they should have different rights and be treated differently. But then it turns out that people just "feel" strongly that there is some difference or that the two should be held apart but are unable to justify this rationally.

It seems possible that to automatically put the interest of any human in all situations above the interests of other animals might be making the same sort of mistake simply because "we feel we are special" and that there should be a strict dividing line between humans who have rights and other animals who do not have rights as individuals at all.

Personally I think everyone is racist at least subconsciously. Even if you agree that race or skin colour are completely irrelevant, you still have different reactions to people based on what race they are on a subliminal level. You can then consciously counteract this, learn to ignore race and try to overcome any prejudices or biases you might have.

It is true that there are differences between humans and other species. The most important difference between "speciesism" and "racism" is probably that we can't communicate with other animals or access their thoughts and desires in anything like the way we can with other humans.

I think with race you can say that there are no fundamental relevant differences and work from there as outlined above. With animals there probably are relevant differences, but it's hard to know what they are or what we should do as a consequence.

What's important with animals, I think, is a willingness to accept that a) we can't simply humanize them and treat them as we would other humans and b) if we say that they are "different" from humans in some important way and their interests therefore don't matter. we should able to justify very very clearly what those differences are and what exactly results from that. Not just that we "feel" animals are different and therefore we can treat them any way we want to. We must be able to say in what ways certain species differ from humans and why, and we should try to treat them accordingly. Not any which way but the best way we know how.

I'm trying to say that we should avoid making the same mistakes we made with sexism and racism, but it doesn't mean that animals must be treated like humans. That would be absurd.

Humans are very highly socialized and have all these legal systems and morals and whatnot. Some animals have fairly complex social arrangements, treat each other nicely and so on, but all in all nature is pretty colossally cruel. Many wild animals lead harsh lives, and I think certain problems arise when this "wild nature" comes into contact with human life with all its moral codes, rights and regulations.

It's bit silly perhaps to give every sentient being some sort of legal protection and rights under human law when they are neither capable of or interested in living in human communities according to their rules. But on the other hand it seems foolish to assume that we have a "right" (as in the Bible) to basically do whatever we want with any animal we come across. Wild animals live in a world that's best off when it's completely detached from ours. And then when we domesticate animals or share territory with wild animals, we need to work out how we should treat them. What considerations we should give them, how we could help them, and so on. Try to deal fairly with them, in other words.