Thanks again for chiming in - I'm always looking for views and evidence that shows whether my thinking is flawed. So here it goes ;)
And to clarify all my arguments are against the large scale meat industry - where most of the meat comes from. I'm not talking about meat from animals you personally hunt or personally raised and killed - or meat coming from farms where the farmers truly try to give the animals a good life.
> Are farm pigs less happy than wild boars? Are you against ant enslavement of aphids? Do humans oppress chicken more than cheetahs oppress antelope?
Wild boars are in their natural state, i.e. free in the wild. Most enslaved pigs lead a miserable life and are confined to very small places, i.e. not free. Do we need aphids for our survival? If not, why enslave them? We can't compare ourselves to cheetahs, who need meat to survive. Humans don't.
> Again you're using human values and trying to project them on animals
That's not what I'm doing. I enjoyed meat dishes, but after doing extensive research of where the meat comes from that I buy in shops I stopped consuming meat. I'm not putting animals and humans on the same pedestal, if that is what you mean.
> [...] but there are cases where you would endure pain for a higher cause
What higher cause are animals 'donating' their flesh to? In our society we don't need meat to survive anymore - it's been proven that we can get all the nutrients we need from plants and other non-animal food sources.
So the only higher cause I can think of - why we continue to make these animals endure pain - is because we derive pleasure from it. So it becomes an ethical question - does our need for pleasure justify enslaving and oppressing these beings and creating destruction on so many other levels?
> The fact that current factory farms aren't ideal isn't a reason to give up on these animals completely.
Factory farms are the reality. Those happy ethical farms are rare in comparison and we can't feed the world with this - it's not scalable - especially since most people want and can only afford cheap meat. Interesting to hear how we can have large scale and pain free factory farms? But I think the question should be, is animal meat the best way to feed the world?
> The ancestors of current meat cows evolutionary chose, by being the easiest to capture and domesticate.
I don't understand how this works - do you have any links to some research that show that this is the case? It was easy for us to 'capture and domesticate' other humans - but we gave up on that practice, because we as a society agreed it was wrong.
Look - I get it. It's not easy to give up meat and we tell ourselves that animals don't feel pain, that we need it to survive, that it's natural etc.
We constantly evolve our moral framework - we gave up barbaric practices that once were the norm.
In the future the way we produce our meat now will be seen as barbaric and immoral. Yes there will still be some people who eat meat - those that hunt and raise and kill it themselves and meat will be available to those that just want to continue to derive pleasure from it, but it will be very expensive.
Edit: typos