Most people who oppose the torture of animals and are sufficiently educated with how industrialized farming works face either discomfort and cognitive dissonance to some degree, or feel inclined to make a change (whatever that may look like.)

As far as the difference between living in the wild and living in industrialized farms, I think allowing animals to live in the wild is vastly more ethical than the misery that awaits them on factory farms. Of course, the current generation of livestock should never be returned to the wild. The "end game" would be the cessation of breeding of these animals.

It'd be quite easy to survive if there were enough people who cared about the well-being of animals and experienced sufficient economic stability to make consumption choices that don't necessarily maximize calories/dollar. Unfortunately those people tend to eschew animal product consumption all together, resulting in your (correct) analysis that the number of animals living in misery on factory farms is dramatically overtaking the number living at harmony on family farms.

I don't buy from factory farms, but any time I go to a local store or farmers market and see a good local cheese, I buy it. I've visited many of the farms personally and have never seen a situation where it didn't look like the animals were living their best life. To shut those farms down, kill off their bloodlines, and replace them with... a way smaller number of slightly different looking ruminants spending their whole existence feeling (rightfully) frightened for their life upon any external stimulus? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And that's the "ideal" case, in reality it's far more likely that the farm will be bought up by some big commercial entity willing to cut more corners than that the good fertile accessible land will simply be yielded to the wild. [1]

[1] "as average farm size has increased, the number of individual farms in the United States has decreased." https://www.statista.com/statistics/196106/average-size-of-f...

Aside from this, farms, like all industries, follow the "tendency towards monopoly" where ever larger players will consolidate, merge, and buyout their competition to maximize their collective control of the market share. I think as long as there is a market for animal products, that market will be overwhelmingly captured by large industrialized farms. It's precisely the most upsetting practices on factory farms that keep costs low enough to make products accessible to working class Americans.

This is, like, the most charitable interpretation possible of the current state of farming for meat.

The only reason I'm not 100% vegan/vegetarian is because, since most people aren't, it restricts a lot the number of dishes you can eat. Specially when you go out in a restaurant. But, if more people would be vegetarians, I'm sure that would change.

It is charitable to call it charitable. Almost all meat, eggs, and dairy comes from factory farming. The small farms that people like to tell themselves they eat from are a literal rounding error [0]. You only get that if you go to the actual small farm itself or eat out at a very expensive restaurant.

- If you buy a meat sandwich from the corner store...factory farming

- If you buy a burrito from a restaurant...factory farming

- If you buy eggs and cheese at a diner...factory farming

- If you buy milk from the grocery store...factory farming

You can tell yourself you only buy from small farms, but there is a 99% chance [0] you are eating factory farmed animal products. Sorry to break it to you.

[0] https://thehumaneleague.org/article/what-is-factory-farming

Farm animals are bred by humans, not taken from the wild, so you wouldn't be introducing any new animals to the wild, to "deal with brutality". You'd simply not bred new animals to live in farms.

Also, I think even small family farms practice male chick culling, so it's not really a great status quo.