The only reason it's more outrageous is because it's 'obvious,' I imagine. In the West, we like our animal cruelty to be kept strictly behind closed doors.
Some ethicist should come up with an electronic controller that keeps the chickens or whatever alive by stimulating neurons like the brain would, but which clearly has no consciousness attached.
Actually, this entire business of needing a whole chicken to make chicken meat seems inefficient. I wonder if there's a way to grow meat tissue like you would algae?
If you don't have all of the nasty digestion bits of a bird, you lost a lot of the nasty disease bits.
If you only have the meat parts of the bird, you don't waste any growth resources on non-saleable parts of the bird.
Plus you only need a couple of animals for breeding/cell harvest.
We could call it a "brain".
It certainly is not that case that just because you do not consume animals means you keep them in humane conditions.
Get real.