In Support of Animal Equal Rights

I do not agree, but if there was anyone who could make such an argument it would be Peter Singer:

Normal adult human beings have mental capacities that will, in certain circumstances, lead them to suffer more than animals would in the same circumstances. If, for instance, we decided to perform extremely painful or lethal scientific experiments on normal adult human, kidnapped at random from public parks for this purpose, adults who entered parks would become fearful that they would be kidnapped. The resultant terror would be a form of suffering additional to the pain of the experiment.

The same experiments performed on nonhuman animals would cause less suffering since the animals would not have the anticipatory dread of being kidnapped and experimented upon. This does not mean, of course, that it would be right to perform the experiment on animals, but only that there is a reason, and one that is not speciesist, for preferring to use animals rather than normal adult humans, if the experiment is to be done at all.

Note, however, that this same argument gives us a reason for preferring to use human infants - orphans perhaps - or severely intellectually disabled humans for experiments, rather than adults, since infants and severely intellectually disabled humans would also have no idea what was going to happen to them.