I will guarantee that a massive percentage of people do in fact have a very strong emotional response to this kind of thing, but it's all just "out of sight, out of mind".
If you make people be involved in the killing of millions of baby chicks, they'll suddenly care very, very much.
Our modern world is doing thousands of thousands of utterly horrible things each and every day, we just don't get to see it or be involved, and we're way too busy making our next mortgage payment and getting the kids to school on time to notice.
Interesting you hold such expectations. Based on my dealings with people I don't think a lasting response would be that great. Empathy and morals seem to suffice while it is convenient, but when necessary people always take the path of least resistance.
For a few days, then they'll get used to like the 1000 previous generations of humans that had to kill animals to survive.
Just a couple of hundred years ago there wouldn't have been many people killing more animals than they could eat.
If there’s a larger “food chain” on the interstellar scale where some intelligent species mass-consume others, would it be “good enough” for some aliens to farm humans like we do animals?
The animals on the farm are welcome to do the same if they don't like being farmed.
I think that's an unhealthy stance to take towards life.
I personally do not see a problem with using animals as food. If that's good enough for all the other omnivores and carnivores in the food chain, it's good enough for humans. There are certainly a lot of problems with the sustainability and humane-ness of our livestock farming, but I don't see "become vegetarian/vegan" as the only solution, or even necessarily a desirable one. But getting into a meat vs. no meat debate here isn't ever going to be productive, so that's all I'll say.
I had not known that male chicks are killed after birth in such numbers, and the practice does make me sad. But I also recognize that a lot of people just don't have any kind of emotional response to this sort of thing, and that's ok too. It's great that people are building new technologies to allow us to keep doing what we're doing, but with better treatment of the animals involved, and less waste.