Why cows should be grateful for burgers

Your life is worth living[1] if, and only if, it is better that you have come to exist than that you never existed at all. Further, a life can be worth living even if it ends brutally. If I were murdered tomorrow, my final thoughts, if I chose to think on this subject, would be that I was glad that I was born. My brutal death would not outweigh the joy that life has given me.

It follows pretty straightforwardly from the above that, if farm animals live lives worth living, there is a pro-tanto reason to eat meat. Meat eating causes many animals to exist, who, it's possible, are glad that they were caused to exist.

(I imagine it's often the case that farm animals do not live lives worth living. Farms breed animals profitably, not humanely. But it also seems plausible that sometimes they do. Free range animals, for example, are intuitively likely to be happy. If my remarks here are true, there is pro-tanto reason to be free-range farming carnivores, factory farming vegetarians.)

I see two objections to this line of argument.

First, it might be objected that a better option would be to breed the same number of animals and not brutally kill them. This would be a little worse for us, but much better for the animals.

I think this is irrelevant. In considering what we ought to do, we need only consider possible options. It might be better if we reared large numbers of animals in altruistic animal theme parks purely for their benefit, but this is not going to occur in the near future, and therefore it's not an option we need consider.

Second, it might be objected that an analogous argument applies to humans. If it turns out that human meat is tasty (who knows?), why not breed humans for food in this manner? This might be thought to be a reductio ad absurdum.

The first objection serves as a rejoinder to the second. It is possible that we can rear humans without eating them, and it's therefore true that that is what we ought to do.

Of course, there are other, better arguments in favour of vegetarianism. It's bad for the environment, excesses of meat are bad for you, and it's bad for your wallet. But the key point is that, with respect to animal cruelty, free range cows ought to be grateful to burgers.

[1] For you. Lives may be worth living because of the benefit they bring to others, but this doesn't seem to be relevant here.