Among "Effective Altruism" rationalist circles, some of them prefer eating beef because a single cow produces a lot more meat than a single chicken, hence less suffering-year units per kilo of meat.

Chickens are also often kept in tiny cages, often mutilated. Cows are too, sometimes, but on average I think cows spend more time outside than most other farm animals. Though this varies wildly of course.

Sadly, growing cattle costs enormous amounts of food that could also feed people. And they seem to contribute quite a bit to greenhouse gasses. So eating beef may be better than eating chicken when it comes to animal welfare, but worse when it comes to the environment.

Best just eat less meat in general.

Supposedly for ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats, etc.) 85% of their feed is not suitable for human consumption. Quite a lot of agricultural waste (e.g., corn stalks, spent mash/grain left from beer production) is upcycled through livestock. For this reason it's common to integrate cultivation of crops along with livestock.

> growing cattle costs enormous amounts of food that could also feed people.

That depends. Sometimes it is true, sometimes it isn't. People can't eat grass, for instance.

By that logic, we should be eating whales, not cattle. A single blue whale produces a lot more meat than a single cow.

To be honest that makes little sense to me. If you care enough about animal suffering to limit the numbers of animals who suffer, why eat the cow at all when you can avoid it?

Unfortunately chicken, like pork, is extremely high in omega-6 due to being fed unnatural modern grain-based diets.