Steinbock Vs Singer

In the debate regarding the utility of non-human animals and their relation to the human kind, I'm inclined to follow Steinbock's lead. Analyzing Singer's argument, it seems to me that he occasionally contradicts his own expressed beliefs, hence making his position somewhat illogical and not as convincing. For instance, Singer supposes that "the basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration." Later he follows this idea by asserting that "equal consideration for different beings may lead to different treatment and different rights." Naturally, my question to Singer would be, what is the use of hypothetically applying "equal consideration" towards all species, if, in practice, it is
He dismisses the claim that the prospect of human wellbeing resulting from such experiments supercedes pain and suffering, which are inflicted to the animals. Instead he bluntly suggests that if we to consider ourselves more valuable only based on our intelligence, then those members of society, who by the virtue of their mental capacity stand on the lower scale of the intellegence abilities, would be less entitled to the fulfillment of their basic human rights. Singer points out that if our value was measured only in amount of our intelligence, then a person with lower IQ would have similar, or even lower, value with an animal, who hold some intellegence abilities. Therefore, he claims, it would be equally justifiable to use mentally challenged or animals in the research projects. Evidently, Singer dismisses the simple factual difference between the two examples. A random healthy adult person, an infant, who is orphan, or a mentally incapacitated, share the same certain privileges just by a sheer reason of belonging to the same group - human race, and are superior to a representative of a non-human animal world, no matter how intelligent in some sense it would