We're not even talking about killing animals for science or the "greater good" when discussing meat consumption.
Animals feel pain and can experience suffering just like humans can.
I think the fact that the suffering in the supply chain is hidden is the main reason it's not a consideration for most consumers.
We can trivially make a machine with the former, and that acts to minimise that sensory input. Does it have the qualia? How might we even be able to prove it either way?
That subjective experience, qualia or whatever you call it, what I meant here by sentience. Given that the term pretty much always leads to discussion like this, I have only myself to blame for forgetting to mention an any of this in the previous comment.
As I understand it, several hog farmers are eaten by their charges every year. Hogs have also been used as a convenient method of disposing of murder victims on numerous occasions over the centuries.
Turnabout is fair play.
This doesn't mean I am unaware of the counter-arguments; disregarding the ones which are essentially just an appeal to tradition, there is still one more I know. To play devil's advocate:
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We have no idea at all what sentience is, and it's entirely conceivable that we're the only ones who really truly have the experience of suffering, rather than just a non-conscious stimulus response mechanism.
By way of comparison, larger current generation AI are of similar complexity to the brains of many of these animals — are those AI sentient?
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Back to my own voice: I often find myself using the {animal brain complexity} ≈ {AI complexity} for the exact opposite purpose, to demonstrate why current AI might well be sentient.