What Ayn Rand is saying is: if you say we should care about animals, you should care about animals. You should actually notice if you're eating meat. You should actually check if your pet that appears to be happy is actually happy. You should ask questions about wild animal suffering. You shouldn't be having discussions about caring about animals only when it happens to come up, which is when you and your buddies happen to talk about it, or on online forums, or when you choose to buy the more expensive "organic" option because it's probably better, or whatever, and the rest of the time live a life completely orthogonal to that, as if they're just words you emit to play a game instead of true, meaningful statements. If you say "nobody can be certain of anything", you shouldn't be certain of anything. If you say "we need to be more compassionate", you should be more compassionate. If you say "we should teach critical thinking in schools", maybe you should actually try to get that to happen, and that involves knowing if it already happens, and why it is failing or succeeding, and to what degree.

What Ayn Rand isn't saying is any sort of linguistic gotcha, or something like that. Why did so many commenters go that route? Jesus. "No, you misinterpreted her, when the whole point of what she said is you shouldn't do that but take her at face value. Unlike you, whose interpretation is a misinterpretation, my interpretation is taking her at face value." Very funny, in a sort of meta way, but no.