I'm all for eating meat, but I agree that some of the meat industry out there is pretty darn awful. Here the standards are good, I think. It's not a very capitalistic country and we're not part of the EU, and animals don't suffer under the dollar or euro as they might do elsewhere.
Some points I don't think anyone else have made so far,
Most domestic animals today like chickens and cattle have been bred for thousands of years, just like dogs. Generally speaking, most of them don't have a place in nature anymore and wouldn't necessarily do very well if we put them back out there. They survive under our protection in our cultured landscapes where there's little predation. It's not universally true, some breeds of sheep do quite well in natural environments for example, but it's certainly valid to the argument. For some of them, if we had no interest in their meat/eggs/feathers/fur or whatever, they wouldn't be around. We made them.
A point about morality is that we need it for us just as much as we need it for the animals. When someone says they don't like the idea of animals suffering, I assume they don't like the idea of people suffering either. That morality is a byproduct of our compassion for eachother and happens when people identify with animals. Still, I think many meat eaters are ignorant of what the lives of industry cattle, pigs, chickens and so on are like. I'm sure that if they really found out - visited an abbatoir or something similar, they'd break down in tears.
I actually think that one reason why vegetarianism is gaining popularity is that people are so far removed from nature these days. People used to gut their own fish, boil their own crabs, slaughter their own pigs. People learned to treat animals more like things. Nowadays, some people hardly ever see animals unless they are pets. Obviously they don't learn how to use them. If anything, they learn to relate to them more as if they were people whose shapes and cognitive abilities are different from ours.
Obviously, farmers, fishers, people working in abbatoirs and so on - they still see and treat animals as things. The conflict has a basic root in the perception of animals.
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