Would you voluntarily clip the beaks of a chicken, pump them full of growth hormones, and pack them so tight they live on top of mounds of their own feces and degraded corpses of other chickens for a fraction of their natural lifespan before having their throats cut, often while not stunned?

Regardless of how you feel about chickens vs humans, I don't see why it's binary. Life is life. Suffering is suffering. There's plenty of inside footage of how chickens and turkeys are treated, no conscious being should be subjected to that.

What about the 121 million pigs slaughtered a year? The 29 million cows?

Some people don't put any weight at all on animal suffering as long as a human benefits. You can't really prove that killing a pig isn't worth the ham you get, how would you even begin to make that objective?

Ultimately it's up to each and every human to make that moral judgement. I don't have a problem with meat eating in the abstract, our species have done it for years, but I do take issue with the idea that it's 1) a luxury to examine food ethics for the first world, when most people commenting on this website live in a land of plenty in terms of food availability and 2) an animal's suffering means absolutely nothing, when I would bet that 99% of people visiting a slaughterhouse would be absolutely reviled by the modern animal condition with how animal farming is currently done. Does our perceived superiority of consciousness entitle us to the vile exploitation of billions of life forms? Would an aliens superior technology visiting Earth entitle them to enslave us, since we'd be nothing more than animals to them?

> when I would bet that 99% of people visiting a slaughterhouse would be absolutely reviled by the modern animal condition with how animal farming is currently done.

I bet 100% of people visiting farms in the third world would be absolutely reviled by the "modern" human condition with how crop farming is currently done. And 99% of vegans/vegetarians disregard the human violence and food shortage behind that quinoa in their plates.

I agree, there's many problems in the world that need to be fixed. Food should be more sustainable. We should make smarter, more conscientious choices behind how we choose our food. I don't see why being plant based, a more sustainable and ultimately less cruel way of consuming food, should be rejected because there's cruelty to how we grow crops like quinoa. The amount of grain we feed to livestock would be enough to feed 800 million people -- we would consume less objectively if we were a plant based society.

The more I read this comment, the less I understand it. Following your train of thought, there'd be LESS people enduring that misery and LESS strain on the world's environments if we ate less meat -- we would need less land to grow mankind's food, and would require less imports from third world countries in doing so.

> I don't see why being plant based, a more sustainable and ultimately less cruel way of consuming food, should be rejected because there's cruelty to how we grow crops like quinoa.

less cruel to whom? I made it very clear that for me, your plant based, "more sustainable" way of consuming cause misery to lots of human-beings, and for me this is more vile and cruel than raise animals to eat nutritious and healthy food.