In our current legal situation, I could enter your yard, take your beloved companion animal Fido and beat him within an inch of his life with a metal baseball bat, and Fido would not have legal recourse. What you, as his owner could due is make a legal claim that I have damaged your property, therefore, you have standing and can take direct action against me: your property has been reduced in value. Your dog, who is now blind, deaf, and mentally retarded because of what I have done does not have legal standing because he is not an object of legal or moral concern within our system.
This said, as Bernard E. Rollin writes, since the early nineteenth century legal rights have been extended beyond human persons to include corporations, ships, trusts, cities, and states. It seems highly unreasonable to argue that Exxon Mobil is an object of direct moral concern, yet this corporation, this nonliving entity, has legal rights. Taco Bell has legal standing: if Taco Bell is "harmed," individuals can act as guardians, not as property owners, and file a legal claim on behalf of the corporation.
The Enron Corporation can be directly harmed under the law, while the only legal harm that occurs when a bull's hind leg's are burned with a blow torch is "property damage."
As such, they could institute legal action, or more accurately, have legal action instituted on their behalf (rather than on the behalf of their owner), have injuries to them legally considered (rather than to their owner), and have legal relief directly to their benefit. The relevant legal analogy here is the case of children. Although children cannot press legal claims on their own behalf, they still enjoy legal rights.
A man recently said that our destruction of the natural world, our relationship with the Earth, is "an outward mirror of our inner self." How apt. It is indeed a reflection of our inner self when we deny legal standing to a feeling animal who is conscious and aware when her interests are being realized or not, but we allow a ship carrying t-shirts and underwear to be an object of direct legal concern.
It should be clear that our collective presupposition that animals are things, but corporations are legal persons, is terribly flawed.
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