I don’t know what’s with this “legally defined” and “arbitrary label”. If someone adopts a stray cat as a companion, legal definitions are not involved. The law is not involved. “Pet” is not an arbitrary label, it is a word with an ordinary meaning that everyone knows. You may disagree with my acceptance of livestock and rejection of maltreating pets, but your faux-naïf framing is not an argument.
You use the word “torture” a lot, but torture has a specific meaning: suffering deliberately inflicted in order to coerce or punish someone, or as an end in itself. (“The purpose of torture is torture.” — O’Brien, in “1984”.) This is not the reason for the suffering of livestock, which is a side-effect of the intention of making food. No farmer, on discovering that the conditions of his animals are more humane than he thought they were, will deliberately go out with a cattle prod to make up the loss of the suffering he thought he was inflicting. If market conditions change to make crops a more profitable use of his land, he will switch without a thought of all the animal suffering he is missing out on.
Intent.
I don’t know what’s with this “legally defined” and “arbitrary label”. If someone adopts a stray cat as a companion, legal definitions are not involved. The law is not involved. “Pet” is not an arbitrary label, it is a word with an ordinary meaning that everyone knows. You may disagree with my acceptance of livestock and rejection of maltreating pets, but your faux-naïf framing is not an argument.
You use the word “torture” a lot, but torture has a specific meaning: suffering deliberately inflicted in order to coerce or punish someone, or as an end in itself. (“The purpose of torture is torture.” — O’Brien, in “1984”.) This is not the reason for the suffering of livestock, which is a side-effect of the intention of making food. No farmer, on discovering that the conditions of his animals are more humane than he thought they were, will deliberately go out with a cattle prod to make up the loss of the suffering he thought he was inflicting. If market conditions change to make crops a more profitable use of his land, he will switch without a thought of all the animal suffering he is missing out on.