> It’s about the suffering from birth to death.
I would suggest for most all animals being raised with constant supply of food and having your health maintained by intelligent actors is far better a life than the brutality found in nature. Caveats apply I'm sure, but in general a farm animal is raised intentionally to eat as much as it can with as little stress as possible. I'd be curious what criteria you could give that would rank animals in nature as suffering less than animals specifically raised in captivity with a specific goal of reducing stressors.
> Human’s system for producing meat has an insane amount of harmful externalities. The polar bear fits into an ecosystem that generally find balance.
harmful to what? to the world ecosystem? You mean the ecosystem that we generally believe has had 5 mass extinction events prior to humans ranging from 75 to 95% of species being wiped out in each of those events? Is that what you call "balance"?
> Not to mention, straw man. You can’t sidestep the question as to whether it is moral to kill an animal a certain way by making a weak argument as to how they might have had it worse.
Well this isn't a strawman at all. I'm not building up some weak argument as you suggest. It's a documented and understood that most animals have predators and of prey species, predation is the most common way to die. Have you ever seen an animal kill another animal gracefully? It does exist, but it is not common.
also, yes I can bypass the moral question and I will do so gladly - completely subjective arguments are pointless, I feel very comfortable in accepting a different moral code than you and I'm fine with your moral code being different than mine.