If all meat was produced the way it was farmed 100 years ago, youd see way less vegans.
IMO everyone should read it, regardless of your stance on eating animals.
Factory farming has been around for more than 100 years. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906.
The meat industry has done a pretty good job keeping the horrors of slaughter houses out of the public eye, especially in the days before almost everyone was walking around with a video recorder in their pocket.
I'm sure exposure to what's really involved in modern meat production has increased the popularity of veganism, but veganism has been around for at least a thousand years.
Still other vegans are motivated by concerns about the environment. For them too, "classical husbandry" will not be a winning argument. If anything the opposite, since it requires more land.
Neither is using fire to cook food.
Your point? (Or are you recommending a raw food diet?)
But definitionally a vegetarian is someone who abstain from eating meat period, regardless of the source. Someone can avoid eating unethically sourced meat but still eat ethically sourced meat and thus definitionally not be a vegetarian. So it's fair to assume that ethical vegetarians (those who practice it for ethical reasons) believe that all meat consumption is unethical. Otherwise they wouldn't be vegetarians.
I acknowledge there is probably a caveat of people who practice vegetarianism because they don't believe they can find ethically sourced meat and thus forgo meat consumption entirely. I find that strange though as cage free meat is pretty widely sold, at least in the USA per my experience.
There's even a small amount of vegans that consider lab meat to be something immoral (how they loop their head around that one, I do not know).
I'm currently dating a girl that's vegan and is super chill about it, but when I was 16 I dated a vegan girl also. My mother made two separate dishes for her, one specifically with esoteric stuff she would like (Christmas being special and all that). Then my mother made the mistake of quickly flipping some burning food with some meat in it, then using the same spatula to muddle the vegan dish. That girlfriend immediately said she would not eat that dish.
I nearly decided to break up with her at that moment.
I'm never quite sure it it's anecdata, but it always feels like there are much more obnoxiously stringent vegans than there are obnoxious meat eaters.
On the other hand, I've seen firsthand how vegans have to consistently defend their lifestyle choice, because by making that choice they reveal the "default" was never really that. Same with those who chose to be sober.
As I grow up I am beginning to realize just how many "bad personalities" and "horrible life choices" are really just driven by a poor environment - and that speaks more of our society and governance than the individuals.
I've never met any other kind of vegan person. If they were concerned only about the living conditions of the animals, then they would eat free-range ethically-raised meat. They don't. Even if it's really free-range and not what the government allows to be called "free-range."
And on top of that it does make a statement about one's values. Even if someone was ok with doing all that homework, they might want to give up meat as a form of protest against all the factory animal farming out there.
If after that you still can't make yourself eat it then you should apologize, explain it to them, tell them you tried to make yourself but couldn't and I bet you'd get a LOT more sympathy.