factory farming is not gratuitous. it's economically efficient which makes a huge difference in people's lives. it has a purpose, which you've evaded.

well if you reject peta, cool, that puts you a rank above a lot of animal rights people. glad to hear it.

i disagree with you about animal cognition. none of this kind of research ever has any good argument that the animal's genes didn't already encode the relevant knowledge to either 1) do whatever the animal accomplished or 2) allow it to get some information stored in memory via some mechanism (e.g. play with siblings, previous attempts at flapping wings, or any other behaviors the genes code for) and then, using a combination of the information stored in memory and the genetic knowledge, do whatever the animal accomplished. (note the storing information in memory part is not a big deal, that part just means animal brains are able to function in part like computer hard drives, which i think we can all agree is true but doesn't indicate intelligence)

what i'd recommend reading on this topic is the section of The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch (http://beginningofinfinity.com) which covers apes and aping – how some kinda impressive stuff can be done without intelligence but in a different gene-based way. this is in chapter 16 and it discusses some research on the topic you may not have seen. here is a sample:

Apes are capable of recognizing a much larger set of possible meanings [than parrots]. Some of them are so complex that aping has often been misinterpreted as evidence of human-like understanding. For example, when an ape learns a new method of cracking nuts by hitting them with rocks, it does not then play the movements back blindly in a fixed sequence like a parrot does. The movements required to crack the nut are never the same twice: the ape has to aim the rock at the nut; it may have to chase the nut and fetch it back if it rolls away; it has to keep hitting it until it cracks, rather than a fixed number of times; and so on. During some parts of the procedure the ape’s two hands must cooperate, each performing a different sub-task. Before it can even begin, it must be able to recognize a nut as being suitable for the procedure; it must look for a rock and, again, recognize a suitable one.

Such activities may seem to depend on explanation – on understanding how and why each action within the complex behaviour has to fit in with the other actions in order to achieve the overall purpose. But recent discoveries have revealed how apes are able to imitate such behaviours without ever creating any explanatory knowledge. In a remarkable series of observational and theoretical studies, the evolutionary psychologist and animal-behaviour researcher Richard Byrne has shown how they achieve this by a process that he calls behaviour parsing (which is analogous to the grammatical analysis or ‘parsing’ of human speech or computer programs).