doing away with factory farms and the way they treat animals. They are not a safe source of food, they destroy our water, land and air. And then to top it all off they do things to animals that is often worse than anything they would experience in the wild.

Where I am from there are lots of farms and we would never think of treating animals the way those places do. 

 I also have no problem with hunting. The argument against it is normally how mean or cruel it is. The PETA types seem to think animals die of old age in a comfortable bed with pain medication so it is easy on them.

"Natural" death for animals is often slow and very painful. Disease, starvation, dehydration, freezing, being eaten(often alive) or some combination of these are much more common for most animals than old age. I think most people would take a bullet over those options.

 I feel that because we can give a farm animal a decent life we are obligated to do so. 

Maybe we can reach a stage someday where the amount of pain (and other harms) experienced is drastically reduced, but it will never be eliminated as long as the interests nonhumans have (in avoiding pain, along with other interests), are inferior to those of their "rightful" owners. As long as the scales tip in the balance of human interests, our interest in cheap flesh, eggs, and dairy products will trump some of the most fundamental nonhuman interests, including that of survival, which you sell short here. Animals' ability to experience pain (due to their sentience) is an evolutionary development that serves as a means to the end of staying alive. Ignoring that interest by killing them is a harm to them, plain and simple, and it's entirely unnecessary!

If we stop breeding animals into existence, which we would do if they were no longer our property, some would go "extinct", but it's not like most of the animals we exploit for food are found naturally in the wild anyway. They have been enhanced through selective breeding (and genetic tinkering) for generations, and are in many ways man-made creations. There is no harm in letting that practice end.

philosophers have argued long and hard about the "qualia" of experience---the ineffable, inherent, qualities of what it means to "see the color red" or "feel pain and pleasure", and whether these qualia are the same even among different human beings.

their conclusion is that either qualia are too vague a term to be useful in any consequential discussion, or that the minimalistic, occam's razorian assumption must be that qualia are shared among sentient beings.

what this further implies is that the formal basis of granting rights to other entities in a system of moral philosophy cannot be based on whether the other entities are _exactly like_, _mostly like_, _somewhat like_, or _not at all like_ the entities granting the rights---likeness is a black hole of needless back-and-forth arguments that cannot be decided based on evidence.

this is why we have the above confusion about whether dolphins feel pain (or see the world) the same way we do, and whether killing a rat is "okay" because a (democ)rat is just a filthy disease-ridden vermin.

this also leads to corner cases among humans. some human beings are unable to feel pain because of neurological problems (they live low-quality lives because they constantly _physically_ hurt themselves, and unlike normal humans, are so unaware of the "pain" that they cannot take any action to avoid the "painful" situation until they damage themselves very badly). in any case, are we to say that such human beings should not be given the same rights as "normal" human beings.

btw, using pain (or the ability to feel it) as the basis for rights is as unteneable as the other great bugaboo that has been used in the past to inflict cruelty on animals, i.e. their intelligence (or the perception of how close their level of intelligence is to our own).

by this argument, human retards (i.e. rethuglicans) are ripe for constant abuse since it is clear that these retards have even less intelligence than (democ)rats and other such disease-ridden vermin.

this still leaves open the question of how we base granting rights and privileges to non-human entities. unfortunately, the answer will always be arbitrary because at some level (and quite contrary to the fervent desires of libertarians and ayn randians), moral axioms are always arbitrary at some level.

this is why it is perfectly fine to be a vegetarian and not wear fur, just as it is perfectly fine to butcher and eat dog.

the only thing (of any worth) that moral philosophers can say regarding this matter is that one needs to be _internally consistent_ w.r.t. the application of moral axioms.

for example, it is silly and contradictory to grow/ask for free-range chicken because such chicken live "better lives", only to kill and cook and eat said chicken.

on the other hand, it is perfectly consistent to grow/ask for free-range chicken because of some perception that such chicken taste better (or produce more healthy meat) than cooped-up chicken.

to each their own.

btw, i am completely opposed to societal idiocies like punishing michael vick for dog-fighting. dogs are property, and vick is free to do anything with his personal property and the rest of society has no business telling him what to do. in fact, dumfuck fatty-fuck americans really have no right to tell anyone else anything about morality, when they have been murdering innocent iraqi babies and torturing people, and have not yet brought anyone to justice for these crimes.