It's already happening. A story about mistreatment of a dog garners reactions like "how can someone act like that to a fur-baby". Same action toward a person and it's elided over as baseline expected violence. By the same token, quasi-deification of animals has happened for a very long time, and all it takes is a mutation of this idea to spread across popular culture.

Most rational, empathetic people generally look down on animal abuse and animal torture. Humans are more important than any other animal to me, but it's not a total dichotomy that makes the suffering of all other thinking, feeling animals meaningless.

Very few rational, empathetic people would be entirely unmoved by their pet dog being killed, and are more than a little perturbed imagining farming dogs for meat like we do other animals, despite the fact that cows and pigs do have feelings, do suffer, do play and have social bonds, and do have similar levels of intelligence to dogs.

We're fortunate enough that we only have one species of human around to worry about. Imagine the political turmoil if we still had many different human species in modern society and had to deal with this kind of debate.