It doesn't matter how high the standards are on farms when the objective of the farm is to kill the animals and exploit them. And again, stress levels don't paint a complete picture of an animal's standard of living.

This all is getting into a different argument against eating meat from the one in original post. My original post is about consequentialism. You are arguing for the extension of human rights regarding freedom to animals. My position on this is explained in the paragraph below.

We don't award humans moral consideration because we can create and negotiate social norms. We do so because humans have inherent characteristics that are morally relevant. Animals share some of these characteristics and that's why we award them some moral consideration too. It has nothing to do with empathy. Empathy is simply the means of realising the value of these characteristics.

Actually, this is simply not correct. Morality and ethics are tools humans use to improve cooperation with one another. The problem with cooperation is that people can cheat, so ethical rules are set up so that the cost of getting found out for cheating is greater than the benefit of cheating. This allows people to cooperate effectively. By cooperate I also mean things like not killing each other.

Empathy is important because it evolved to help us prioritize cooperation. If I empathise with someone, then I feel pain when they feel pain, so I am more motivated to help them, increasing my social prestige, and oppotunities for future cooperation. Empathy is usually beneficial to the individual who is empathising. However, there is no benefit to empathising with animals; it is just a quirk of our neural programming that empathy can be non-specific to humans.

As other humans are our only other cooperative partners, the needs of other humans are all that is considered in ethics. It is only because animal pain causes human suffering that we care about it.

And as I've argued above, that's not relevant.

Well, you haven't convinced me.