I'm not necessarily a huge fan of factory farming, but if people want to be able to buy meat at any time, I don't really know much of a way around it. Though ranching still exists, there are plenty of ranches with heads of cattle that graze freely and eventually are taken to slaughterhouses.

If we did end factory farming, it wouldn't be as simple as just releasing these animals into the wild either. If we did they would very likely die of starvation. So we're talking about a generation of cattle/chickens that would basically need to be killed off so we didn't mess up the environment with a massive population explosion it couldn't handle.

On top of all of that, you are acting as if these animals are capable of the kind of thought that you and I are. They can think about their future, what their eventual fate is. This is fallacious. While animals may show signs of intelligence, there is no evidence of any kind of consciousness similar to ours.

This can even be evidenced through humans. People used to think that deaf people were mentally retarded in some way. Hence "deaf and dumb", however a lot of them were simply missing language. Language is extremely important as it not only allows for group cohesion, it also makes inner dialogue possible. While animals may have some basic kind of communicative capabilities, it is nothing on the level of humans. So without some kind of language, even if they're theoretically capable of cognitive thought, they can't have the same kind of existence as us.

https://www.verywell.com/deaf-history-deaf-not-retarded-1046...

Edit: Another link https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-langua...