Why is it hyperbole? We slaughter 25 million animals a day in the United States. That amounts to over 9 billion animals a year. Do you attribute 0 consciousness to those animals, a complete and total unawareness of their suffering? Almost every single one of those animals goes through torture and standards of living no one would deign as humane if they were done on their pets.
Would you voluntarily clip the beaks of a chicken, pump them full of growth hormones, and pack them so tight they live on top of mounds of their own feces and degraded corpses of other chickens for a fraction of their natural lifespan before having their throats cut, often while not stunned?
Regardless of how you feel about chickens vs humans, I don't see why it's binary. Life is life. Suffering is suffering. There's plenty of inside footage of how chickens and turkeys are treated, no conscious being should be subjected to that.
What about the 121 million pigs slaughtered a year? The 29 million cows?
Some people don't put any weight at all on animal suffering as long as a human benefits. You can't really prove that killing a pig isn't worth the ham you get, how would you even begin to make that objective?
Ultimately it's up to each and every human to make that moral judgement. I don't have a problem with meat eating in the abstract, our species have done it for years, but I do take issue with the idea that it's
1) a luxury to examine food ethics for the first world, when most people commenting on this website live in a land of plenty in terms of food availability and
2) an animal's suffering means absolutely nothing, when I would bet that 99% of people visiting a slaughterhouse would be absolutely reviled by the modern animal condition with how animal farming is currently done. Does our perceived superiority of consciousness entitle us to the vile exploitation of billions of life forms? Would an aliens superior technology visiting Earth entitle them to enslave us, since we'd be nothing more than animals to them?
> when I would bet that 99% of people visiting a slaughterhouse would be absolutely reviled by the modern animal condition with how animal farming is currently done.
I bet 100% of people visiting farms in the third world would be absolutely reviled by the "modern" human condition with how crop farming is currently done. And 99% of vegans/vegetarians disregard the human violence and food shortage behind that quinoa in their plates.
It depends what value you attribute to a life. For example, is the life of one adult human more valuable than the life of one hundred million adult chimpanzees? These things are very hard to quantify.
It might be best to split human and non-human slaughter into entirely separate categories. You don't need to make comparisons between one and the other; you can just accept that both are unacceptable.