No. Just because something bad that happened is in the past, doesn't make it OK that it happened in the first place. (just to be clear, I am ok with killing animals and eating them, I would just prefer that it be done humanely).
I'm afraid I don't understand the argument you are trying to make with the rest of your comment...
>Just because something bad that happened is in the past, doesn't make it OK that it happened in the first place.
It is ok that it happened. It's ok that everything in the past happened. It's not ok to forget that it happened, or to fail to learn from it. But killing something is a great big "fuck you" to that thing's memory and learning facilities, so there's quite a lot of hypocrisy wrapped up in thinking that killing something is ok if it didn't suffer.
Suffering and death are bad for reasons. Those reasons provide proportionality to ethical evaluations.
I believe this to be your central point? It seems we will have to agree to disagree.
The problem with suffering is not that it has the magical quality of being called 'suffering'. The problem with suffering is that it results in poor decision-making. This means two things:
1. For an individual, death does much more to reduce decision-making ability than suffering.
2. Animals don't usually make good decisions regardless. Especially if they were raised to be slaughtered.