Practices like whale-hunting or killing elephants for ivory, which cause non-human suffering, could be justified under utilitarianism if the human interest-satisfaction they produce outweighs the non-human interest-frustration.
Outweighs(comparing human benefits against animal harm in utilitarian calculations)
Is greater than or more important than when you're comparing two things on a scale.
Utilitarianism(One of Sidgwick's three methods of ethics)
The view that an individual self-evidently ought to aim at the maximum balance of happiness for all sentient beings present and future, whatever the cost to herself; also called Universalistic Hedonism
As the utilitarian focus is the balance of pleasure and pain as such, the question of to whom a pleasure or pain belongs is irrelevant to the calculation and assessment of the rightness or wrongness of actions. Hence, the eighteenth century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1789), and later Peter Singer (1993), have argued that the interests of all the sentient beings (i.e., beings who are capable of experiencing pleasure or pain)—including non-human ones—affected by an action should be taken equally