Well, the simple answer is that I have no idea. At all.
A lot of animal ethicists are really bothered by ownership. You can own a thing, but not a person. Things are not morally significant; persons are. Therefore, if animals are morally significant they must be persons not things. Fuck that. Why the dichotomy?
Look, if an animal is owned or adopted or cared for does not matter in the slightest to the animal SO LONG AS HER INTERESTS ARE MET. She does not have an interest in not being owned. She has an interest in living her life with a balance of more pleasure than pain. She has rights not to be hurt or killed - because being hurt or killed matter - but ownership is an abstract human-invented thing that is meaningless. Why invest energy in this?
Why do we have to contort sparrows or persons in order to make sparrows persons? Why can't a sparrow matter as a fucking sparrow?
(OK, people don't own sparrows. Maybe I should have said a puppy. Better alliteration, too. Can't believe I didn't make the puppy choice. I considered pig but two syllables was better. Pandas would have been more random than sparrows. Poodle. That would have been fine.)
Now, I can see what is objectionable about choosing when, with whom and how often a poodle is to have puppies - or sire puppies. But given the scale of the problems with animals, this seems minor. I can also see that cheetah mating, say, can be seen as objectionable - I seem to recall that females are forced in a less than loving fashion by males... but this comes back to what I was saying about human morality... is it right to impose it?
Here is where another problem comes. Anthropologists were wary of condemning the traditions of other cultures. So female genital mutilation or cannibalism, for example, would be regarded as 'right for them'. (Actually, I don't think cannibalism is worse than bovinism or ovinism or whatever.) If we have the notion of speciesism as akin to racism, and move from all humans being maximally morally significant to all sentient beings being maximally morally significant, then there comes this logical demand to condemn male cheetahs. But this is just wrong. It's also wrong to insist elephants use their hands not their trunks and that sharks breathe air. Evolution and biology and the facts of the matter MATTER. Things are NOT the same.
So how can reason reason through this?
Is there a web of meaning?
You've got my attention!