Not that I'm not worried about antibiotic abuse and such breeding disease, I mean that I don't care at all about the animals' welfare.
You raise a good point, though. Unless blinston also doesn't care about human welfare, it leaves the question unanswered as to why he would care about humans and not animals.
Are you perhaps, a psychopath? Do you think we should get rid of the laws that prevent people from gratuitously torturing animals?
Many meat-eaters that I know are meat-eaters because they are very much attuned to social norms. They intuitively know that breaking from the common belief that animals are objects could threaten their socialization, which can add to their reluctance to entertain vegetarian ideas.
But I'm glad that you brought up the concept of psychopathy, because anyone who reads up on factory farming would realize that people who do that to animals are not mentally healthy. It's like the 99% of us who aren't psychopaths have delegated the messy work of factory farming to the 1% of us that are psychopaths.
If I set stray cats on fire for entertainment I can expect a visit from the police and/or an angry mob of my neighbors.
Theoretically, yes. In practice, no. Most people agree with this statement. However, you don't need to eat or wear animals to lead a happy, productive life (e.g., I know someone who has been vegan for over 30 years). So eating meat is optional--it's a choice people make. It's not necessary.
As far as the suffering goes, the suffering that occurs in factory farms is the worst imaginable. For example, it's routine for male chicks to be ground alive and for chickens to have their beaks cut off. And more than 99% of livestock is factory farmed.
So this is where theory does not meet practice. If people really believed that "we should avoid inflicting needless suffering on animals" then the majority of the population would be vegetarian.
"set stray cats on fire for entertainment"
To me this is morally equivalent to eating factory-farmed meat because you enjoy the taste (provided you are aware of the intense suffering of factory farms).