I don’t eat meat myself but I would be ok if animals got treated well during their lifetime and just had one bad day when they get slaughtered. Wild animals also usually don’t have good endings. What I object to is the cruelty these animals are subjected to for their whole life. Their whole life is a sequence of very bad days without reprieve.
Ignoring the fact that the “one bad day” method is still messed up (would we be cool if i shot my dog in the head as soon as I was inconvenienced?), there is no way to ensure these animals treated well before their slaughter and maintain any level of scale. If you want to pay $60 for a dozen eggs, sure, maybe there is a way to ensure your “one bad day” eggs are in super markets. Otherwise the only way it works is if the welfare of animals is ignored.
To know that you aren’t supporting such violence, it’s easy: just don’t eat animal products.
Or, just raise your own animals. As far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly ethical to kill your own food or harvest eggs laid by your own chickens. No need to pay money for other naturally produced foodstuffs; fresh eggs and high-quality meat are excellent mediums of trade.
As you mention, the problem is scale, but then everyone doesn't have to live in a city. Different solutions for different situations and all that.
I think people would still take issue with me buying a puppy, raising it for a year, and then shooting it in the head to eat it. If that's true, then I think people are actually far less cool with the "one bad day" argument than they think.
Even if you treat an animal like royalty for years and decide one day to kill it for food or clothing or whatever, you are still doing something wrong. Our treatment of anything does not grant us the privilege to end its life.
We feel this way about dogs and cats, and other humans, but never pigs or cows or sheep or goats or fish, etc. And there is no reasonable explanation for why, other than speciesism.
