I disagree with your assertion that intelligence doesn't equal consciousness. I fully believe that consciousness is directly caused by intelligence. In fact I would argue that consciousness is actually intelligence, in that a being can't have a high level of intelligence without having self-aware level consciousness.

I also think your analogy to apex predators is inaccurate as past apex predators do not have the intelligence to communicate with us, nor do we share a civilization with them.

Similarly your analogy about apes is inaccurate as apes would not suddenly achieve human level self-aware intelligence due to the slow process that is evolution where as the evolution of technology is infinitely faster and increases in rate as it advances. This means that as we build AI we could very quickly thrust ourselves into a world in which we are faced with self-aware intelligent AI that may or may not be at that time being treated well by our society. This is where the potential for conflict arises and why it's important to discuss and define these ideas of rights in order to avoid the possibility that we could create something as intelligent as us and then have slavery 2.0 followed by a civil rights movement if not violent uprising. This is the entire concept of Planet of the Apes really, it shows the exact fear we have with causing a situation where we suddenly have a highly intelligent species that we treat as lower class beings without rights.