You are right, much worse than breeding conscious creatures into a life of suffering only to be eaten, because they taste a bit better than plants.
do the cattle on our farm suffer? with the exception of the couple times per year where we run them through the chute for immunization, fly pour, tagging, etc, they have free reign over almost 200 acres of pasture, which includes a couple of ponds and occasionally the river when we fence it off so they can graze on the other side. that’s 363 days of the year where they’re well fed, protected, and can shit in a new place every time.
at the end of their lives? sure. we’ll load up a couple or so of the oldest ones per year and drive them up to the butcher where he does whatever butchers do when they turn it into beef. that’s enough meat for my whole nuclear family to live off of for a year or more.
the rest of them just chill out and do whatever they want. they get fresh water from a well all day, they get to chow down on corn stalks after harvest, bales of hay or alfalfa whenever, salt and mineral licks, plenty of shade in the summer with the aforementioned ponds to go for a dip or the river when we can, and top quality medical attention. hell, we spent a few months nursing a heifer back to health last year after she got injured from having a calf and slipped into a depression. twice a day, we’d come out to her and bring her fresh hay to lay in, to eat, clean up her waste, a tub of grain, water, the works, and we worked with her using a brace and a front-loader to help her regain the use of her hind legs. she came out of it fine and dandy.
yeah, we take a couple cattle or so a year down to the sale barn once they’ve grown up. can’t say I always know the farmer what buys ‘em, but the majority of farmers around here raise their cattle the same way we do so I’d assume they get pretty much the same treatment we give them.
of course, we’re not a factory farm. so, y’know, yeah, factory farms can be pretty fuckin’ shit for everyone involved.
but, y’know...always hate getting generalized by people who declare all people who raise cattle to be heartless bastards. we’ve got maybe 25 head of cattle, and my grandpa can recognize each one individually even without a tag. he cares more about the well-being and happiness of those cattle than he does his own health, and he’s 83 with hella health problems.
and, also, y’know...just because someone eats plants doesn’t diminish the real suffering of the people who pick those plants for a few dollars a day, a few cents a bushel, just so some smug jackass on the internet can posture themselves as being more socially aware than someone who enjoys a glass of milk or a cheeseburger. doesn’t diminish the amount of damage done to the planet to transport those plants to your nearest Whole Foods using trucks running on fossil fuels and contributing to global warming as well as plenty of environmental disasters. doesn’t diminish the amount of waste that occurs from all the plants that are thrown out when the store can’t sell them rather than donated to those in need, the energy costs of keeping those plants refrigerated, brightly lit, and softly misted so you can feel ten of them before finding the one that’s juuuuuust right, the runoff and/or impact of all of those chemicals being used to protect those plants from pests and weeds.
but, I’m not going to generalize all people who are vegan/vegetarian as assholes, because that’s just a douchey thing to do.