You presuppose that torture is always willful. In the context of human-scale meat production, it seems unavoidable. Yet we accept this, as it is necessary for consumer demands. The employees of factory farm facilities may very well suffer "emotional depravity;" not as a prerequisite for their duties, but as a result.
The nature of torture aside, taking the life of a sentient being is the ultimate violation of its rights. I don't see how any act less than killing can be considered morally worse than killing.
Animals are not sentient. Higher animals have some form of emotion and a great capacity to suffer but as far as we can tell today, they do not have self-aware and self-reasoning intelligence.
Okay, I used the wrong word. My point remains unchanged. Animals, in their various are not capable of enough intelligence or self-reasoning to be considered thinking beings requiring equal protection with people. It is not morally wrong for a human to hunt animals, farm animals, use animals for labor, or keep animals as pets.
This does not make it right for a human to deliberately cause harm to an animal for pleasure or entertainment. I also would consider trophy hunting to be immoral if one leaves the body to rot.
> The nature of torture aside, taking the life of a sentient being is the ultimate violation of its rights. I don't see how any act less than killing can be considered morally worse than killing.
The companies condoning the torture are publicly traded companies which are legally obligated to maximize profits. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that this is happening on a massive scale. They only ways we can stop it are to create new regulations (the ones there today are ignored and the government is not staffed to enforce them) or for the public to stop buying from companies who torture animals. Both scenarios seem pretty unlikely to me, so I am not sure what to do.
They are different things that inflict a different amount of suffering and distress on a creature capable of feeling suffering and distress.