[strken]

Most dairy farmers I've met in Australia care about their herds emotionally. Even though they send old cows and bobby calves to the knackers, they still build relationships with individual animals. It can seem paradoxical to anyone who hasn't watched them.

If it helps, consider a farmer with a tractor. The tractor is a beloved tool that's integrated into daily life, and yet it's going to end up as scrap metal when it breaks beyond repair. The emotional connection to the thing exists, yet the farmer doesn't believe the thing has the rights of a person, and there's no cognitive dissonance.

[BagelGuy]

  and there's no cognitive dissonance

There is but I've grown tired about arguing this on the internet.

Once you dive deep enough there aren't a whole lot of logically sound ethical theories that allow for one to systematically imprison, enslave, and murder these beings without allowing us to do the same to less intelligent humans (which most agree is horrifying).

It's a horrible thing that humans subject these beings to and we will look back on it with great shame.

If anyone reading this is open minded and interested in reading more, I'd recommend diving into the arguments against speciesism.

[strken]

I would argue that veganism and vegetarianism due to a belief that keeping livestock is wrong come about from either disgust at the process of butchery, or a modern alienation from the way your food is produced, and that neither of those are morally consistent.

In a mouse plague, there's a sowing of grain, which becomes edible; it is eaten by a burgeoning wave of mice; following that, there's a smaller wave of rats, which feed on the mice; and according to urban legend, in really bad years there's an increase in the number of snakes. When you eat a bagel, there's a strong possibility it was made from grain grown by farmers who put buckets of water under the legs of their beds to drown the mice and rats that try to climb on them in the night. It is not clear to me that the "enslavement" of a somewhat-happy herd of cows that all end up slaughtered is worse than this boom/bust famine cycle where the rodents spend a substantial fraction of their lives starving and either die from that or from getting ripped apart/swallowed whole by predators.

You can track the deaths per calorie, in fact: https://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/. It's slightly higher for dairy than for grain, and much higher for meat[0], but deaths are an unavoidable part of human agriculture. If you genuinely believe the lives of mammals are morally equivalent to human lives, where does that leave you, with regard to cognitive dissonance?

[0] Arguably not so high for pasture-fed beef and dairy! This applies to most Australian cattle. Some of the year they'll be eating silage or hay, or fattened in feeding lots that provide death-inefficient grain calories, but it's still a big factor.

[BagelGuy]

"If you genuinely believe the lives of mammals are morally equivalent to human lives"

I didn't say this ;)

Of course all human agriculture leads to animal suffering.

A more pertinent (and difficult to measure) metric would be suffering per calorie. Industrialized dairy is brutal. Momma cow is forcefully impregnated and separated from her baby so you can have that baby's milk in your coffee.

One could also argue that you have a higher moral obligations to a cow that you are exploiting than a mouse attempting to eat your grain.