This is a very hot take—the feed lots you describe are horrific! Not only are they in tiny, cramped pens, these pens are filled with mud and shit! The food they're eating is not nirvana, it's the barest possible nutrition to fatten them up according to their warped genetic urgency to get bigger at an unnaturally fast pace that trashes their natural health. This isn't an all you can eat buffet and a spa—getting pumped full of antibiotics because their environment is so toxic is hardly what I'd guess they "want."

This kind of argument relies on the idea that human beings and animals are fundamentally different, that somehow cow suffering is unrelated to human suffering. But most of what we feel and do every day is not actually dictated by consciousness. If you were put into a tiny, roasting summer pen so tiny you couldn't even walk in circles, filled with drugs, covered in your own excrement, ravaged by hunger even though all you do is eat dirty grey hard food, I don't think you'd respond with some kind of elegant, mathematical, civilized emotion. You'd be out of your mind with terror, sadness and grief. Cows can feel all those things, and they do in factory farms. It's common sense, and I agree with those who say we will look back on this era as a disgusting, ignominious chapter in human society.