>I don't believe that I limited my comment to cow leather.
I did. Usually, when people talk about "leather", they're talking about cow leather, not goat leather, sheepskin, alligator skin, etc. Usually, those other things, which are far more rare and expensive, are explicitly named. No one with an alligator-skin handbag calls it a "leather handbag". If cow meat magically became worthless because no one wanted to eat it any more (or even use it for pet food), no one would be killing cows for their skin IMO. The price would be too high, and you could get the skins from other animals instead. Goat leather is much nicer than cow leather, for instance. Why pay a ton for cow leather when you can have something better instead for that price? We only use it so much because it's cheap, and because synthetic alternatives aren't quite as good yet (though that's changing).
>I'm not sure if animals would agree that an easy life free from random predation is much better than a harder life that comes with freedom.
That's not the alternative. Cows are not wild animals. They're domesticated; they only exist because we bred them to be the way they are. They couldn't even survive in the wild. This isn't like alligators being hunted in the wild swamps of FL for their skins. So the alternative is 1. an easy life free from random predation or 2. not existing at all. The same alternative exists for any livestock animal: it's either be born into a life being used by humans somehow, or not be born at all. Which is better? I really don't know. I'm not sure anyone can know that really, since we've never had to live that life, and can't really know the thoughts and desires of these animals. Do chickens living at a crowded Tyson facility, confined to a tiny cage and being shat on by chickens in little cages stacked on top of them, hate their lives so much that they wish they'd never been born? Maybe. Do chickens raised in a family's backyard with lots of space to roam and a henhouse they can enter or leave at will, but who one day get grabbed and flipped upside-down and their head chopped off, prefer they'd never been born? Somehow I doubt it, until that last fateful day (which they probably didn't know was coming; they're probably not smart enough to wonder "hey, why aren't there any elderly chickens here?").