Look at the way cattle and sheep are farmed over moorlands in the UK, the animals are literally left alone on land hundreds of hectares large, they live in as "natural" environment as physically possible. We can argue that a human left in those conditions would be unhappy with the still limited space, but I don't think we can argue in good faith that any animal is "unhappy" in those circumstances.

If we substitute your children into their lifestyle, would you be ok with that? Run around these free fields, but there are fences, and you will have to subject yourself to mandatory harvest long before the end of your natural lifespan. Ah and sometimes a dude will come around and shove a stick with a magnet down your throat to collect metal junk you've eaten because people carelessly throw away trash. I never talked about happiness, I talked about self determination. Yes it's not all equally bad, but saying humane farming is like saying humane torture. A dichotomy and a lie. I'm not saying farming equals torture, I'm saying self determination and farming are fundamentally incompatible.

Animals are not humans though, so this comparison is completely moot(for me anyway).

>>Humans are still imposing their will on these animals.

That's like saying that I'm imposing my will on my dog by making him live with me. Like....I guess you are correct? That doesn't automatically make it bad - if it does for you, then I guess that's where we disagree.

>> I talked about self determination

I don't believe animals have self determination in the first place, not it in the same way humans do. A cow is neither capable of deciding its own fate, nor is any attempt to give it such agency even remotely reasonable. Again, I expect we will disagree here.

>> but saying humane farming is like saying humane torture

Uhmmm, again, no not really, because keeping an animal on an open moor like in my example wouldn't be called torture by literally anyone other than the most extreme believer in animal rights. After all that's where these animals normally live, the fact that there is a fence there(sometimes there isn't even one, or if there is the animal might literally never come across it), is literally the only difference between "wild" and "farmed" animal here.

But for the sake of the discussion - do you then consider hunting wild animals ethical or humane? Like a bunch of deer living in a forest, and they just get shot one day - is that more or less ethical than killing a sheep that spent its entire life out in the open? What makes that difference?

This is also true of vegetable farming.

If you are arguing that dividing humans from animals is arbitrary, the same is true of dividing the other kingdoms of life from Animalia.