Yes, I'm using 'care about X' to mean some combination of 'actually motivated to promote X's welfare' and 'actually motivated to self-modify, if possible, to promote X's welfare'. If I could, I'd take a pill that makes me care enough about non-humans to avoid eating them; so in that sense I care about non-humans, even if my revealed preferences don't match my meta-preferences.
Meta-preferences are important because I frequently have conflicting preferences, or preferences I need to cultivate over time if they're to move me, or preferences that serve me well in the short term but poorly in the long term. If I just do whatever I 'care about' in the moment at the object level, unreflectively, without exerting effort to shape my values deliberately, I end up miserable and filled with regret.
In contrast, I meta-want my deepest wants to be fairly simple, consistent, and justifiable to other humans. Even if I'm not feeling especially sympathy-laden on a particular day, normative elegance and consistency suggests I should care about the suffering of an exact replica of myself just as much as I care about the suffering inside my own skull. This idea generalizes to endorse prudence for agents that are less similar to me but causally result from me (my future selves) and to endorse concern for agents that will never be me but can have states that resemble mine, including my suffering. I have more epistemic warrant for thinking humans instantiate such states than for thinking non-humans do, but I'm pretty sure that a more informed, in-control-of-his-values version of myself would not consider it similarly essential that moral patients have ten fingers, 23 chromosome pairs, etc. (Certainly I don't endorse decision procedures that would disregard my welfare if I had a different chromosome or finger count, whereas I do endorse procedures that disregard me should I become permanently incapable of experiencing anything.)
If I wish I were a nicer and more empathic person, I should just act like a nicer and more empathic person, to the extent I'm able.
I'm currently unconvinced either way on this matter. However, enough arguments have been raised that I think this is worth the time of every reader to think a good deal about.
http://nothingismere.com/2014/11/12/inhuman-altruism-inferential-gap-or-motivational-gap/