Until technology advances thee is only one way to make meat: by killing a living creature. You do not get to just remove that step from the conversation because you don’t like it. There is no “huge difference” when the action is a required part of producing meat.
But… if the animal is treated well during its lifetime, and slaughtered humanely (as painlessly as possible), almost everybody isn’t going to have a problem with it. You are then getting into religious beliefs which most are not going to agree with.
Admittedly a lot of current practices are pretty horrible.
I agree that killing is inseparable from consumption.
But there is absolutely a huge degree of difference in how the killing occurs, and how the animal is treated during its life leading up to it.
These differences materialize as an array of options when deciding what to purchase, and are factors that can be weighed by an individual.
The difference is there and quite meaningful once you examine the spectrum of realities involved in modern meat production.
One might still believe that no form of animal killing is ever acceptable regardless of circumstances, but that places the argument in a different category.
The topic here is about animals who are fed excessive quantities of antibiotics while healthy, fattening them up to the point that their skeletons frequently fracture because they can't bear the weight. These are not well-treated "happy hens". They are chickens crammed by the tens of thousands into barns with about as much square footage as it has birds. Sometimes less. The unroofed "free range" they get access to may amortize out to a couple square inches per bird, in a portion of the facility they'll never reach due to bird traffic.
It is of no solace to any of the 40 billion individual chickens presently in factory farms that some others may be raised in a coup in a backyard of someone's hypothetical uncle's house. And the hypothetical existence of said uncle has no relevance to the act of paying others to abuse birds in farms, which is where every single person reading this is getting either the vast majority or all of their bird flesh.
To be clear, I find the conditions you're describing to be abhorrent and an unacceptable norm, and I've argued elsewhere in this thread to that end.
But real free-range farms actually exist, and are not someone's "hypothetical uncle's house". The products of these farms are available in stores, and purchasing them does not contribute to the abuse of animals in factory farms.
To claim otherwise cannot be justified by an examination of facts/reality, and is to claim that I didn't eat dinner last Thursday. This is not to say that sourcing food this way is easy, and it's certainly not cheap.
> the act of paying others to abuse birds in farms, which is where every single person reading this is getting either the vast majority or all of their bird flesh.
The point with all of this is that there is a nuanced conversation to be had. Oversimplified binary reductions do not represent reality nor are they a useful point from which to have a conversation about how to improve the status quo. Issuing blanket statements like the one quoted above can only create a wedge between your position and those who you'd arguably like to reach with it. I happen to agree with you re: the horrors of unhappy hens, but you're also directly contradicting my lived experience.
GP's point is that eating isn't killing, you can eat meat without (personally) killing any animals, and that can be (and for very many is) emotionally different for people.
And the general counterpoint to this is that the emotional distance gained by not doing the killing has zero relevance to the moral acceptability of mass abuse in factory farms.
Furthermore, that emotional distance leads to even more grotesque behavior because people are so far removed from the process that they can remain completely unaware.
Over time, more people have become aware of child labor and otherwise horrible working conditions in the production of clothing and shoes. Not being directly exposed to those conditions does not in any way excuse those conditions or make them acceptable.
