Forgive me if I fell for deadpan sarcasm... but you're joking, right?
Commercial organizations who make money from the sale of environment (natural resources, such as petrolium, animals, crops) have orders of magnitude more money to spend to fund research than organizations which seek to protect those resources.
This is ancient as the bible (the first murder, when the crop farmer murdered the animal farmer).
For example, one thing we now know, is that Coca-Cola (a crop-based company) bribed scientists to blame the obesity crisis on meat, and deflect it away from its own products.
So no, that person is not joking, animal rights activists are not fighting big-corpo only, they are ALSO helping big-corpo, they are just pawns in a chessboard that is too big for many of them realize they are pawns.
This is ancient as the bible (the first murder, when the crop farmer murdered the animal farmer).
I don't know if anyone at Cargill has read the bible, but they are the largest ag company in the USA and raise livestock, food crops, and animal feed crops. They have over $100B in Global revenue each year.
When their common enemy is environmentalists, nature/animal welfare supporters (which includes those concerned with insect or soil life population), and human health experts (who raise issues with factory farmed meat effects on humans), the two forces you mention definitely do work together.
It is fair to say that crop corporations fight animal corporations less than they fight environmentalist/animal-welfare organizations.
We have only just now reached the point where the last group of anti-climate people have begun accepting that climate change is real. They've simply moved their argument to "it wasn't humans' fault". This is 100% because of the overwhelming influence of energy sector finances vs environmentalists.
The same goes on with food/animal topics.
Sure, the odd paper comes out showing that something bad is actually bad. But as HN talks about quite often, being a researcher is a difficult balance between producing research that pleases the financial backers and which is of real scientific value.