I respect your noble pursuit of not eating meat, and I have encountered arguments similar to yours enough times now that I feel compelled to respond in genuine kindness as someone who does like to eat meat (within "reason").

Animals are benignly cruel to each other beyond your imagination or the production of what nature documentaries will show you. Nature is a fight of survival. No animal wants pain or to be eaten, yet that is the reality that every wild animal faces. The conversation of humanizing animals is very interesting, but in the process we disregard the reality of their natural existence. Their lifespans are short, and often brutal. I weigh the reality of wilderness to the reality of industrial farming and ask myself if there isn't some kind of middle ground. I think there is. You can raise animals in pastures where they free range outside. They have a relatively peaceful, predation, free life after which you consume them (by killing them quickly and painlessly).

I deplore the reality of industrial farming and "agricultural waste". Chickens being raised for one singular body part and then thrown away. We do not treat any of our food with respect, living or otherwise. We are not efficient. We do not care about quality. We don't even try consuming the whole thing. That's where I find this industry disgusting. Meat should not be this disposably cheap.