Personally, I consider humans and animals to have the same rights (if anything I think human's should have less than animals because animals haven't f*cked everything up) but I still eat meat because I see it as part of the food chain. Small animal is eaten by big animal, that's how it is for animals and in the wild and I see no reason why it should be different for us. I do not condone the bad treatment of animals and knows this does go on, but it's a lot better than it was 50 years ago and I hope that by 50 years time it'll be a lot better, sometime getting to the point where animals are treated how they should be.
Let us not forget that humans are animals as well. We just have bigger egos.