Here is where you are wrong again. I guess maybe all of those massive volumes of tax laws that dictate how much of our pay we have to fork over are for "our protection"?
Having laws that prevent cruelty towards animals may hinder one person from "having a fun time" by torturing a defenseless creature, but it helps prevent the rest of the populace from becoming the next "defensless creature" to become his target by punishing that behavior.
Go back in time a couple of hundred years ago, and you will find a time when slaves were not considered to have the same rights of safety as other people. They were property. By your reasoning, it was ok for them to be tortured and killed for the amusement of their owners. That is completely flawed logic.
Owning a non living, non sentient object gives you certain rights towards it. You can certainly take a hammer to your television if you so choose. When the object is a sentient species, however, those rights do not completely carry over.
And if you want to argue that humans are the only sentient species on the planet, then you are so far out in left field that it becomes pointless to even attempt to discuss this with you.