Do you agree with Richard Dawkins?

[toro]

I think the disconnect here is what you term "unneccessary suffering", honestly. Many people take a naive or polemicized view of what suffering is entailed in the process of livestock production (or why this or that practice is used).

We've all seen the documentaries where cameras are taken into shitty slaughterhouses. The viewer might be left with the notion that this is how it is done, or the only way that it can be done. This is entirely untrue. This is a problem of standards and enforcement, not morality or ethics. It may seem strange to stun an animal then bleed it out, but this is "necessary" to prevent spoilage of the meat.

Meat is a very important food source for us. It may seem "unnecessary" to you but this is likely due to your country of origin. Agricultural crops are not as reliable as livestock (except in capital intensive systems largely relegated to first world countries, and even then often on the backs of livestock operations in third world countries), common protein substitute crops are not suitable for production in all areas. This is letting aside the big hungry gap in any given climate beyond the subtropics (the tropics actually have a hungry gap in the warmest months, some parts of the subtropics do as well).

How are agricultural crops less reliable than livestock? Livestock are dependent on agricultural sources as well. Did you mean less labor intensive? Both definitions seem to neglect the amount of secondary resources/labor required to bring the animal from birth to dinner plate.

That doesn't really address the morality of the issue though...

Under the "either you have it or you don't" argument, couldn't I just anesthetize any animal before slaughter? Or perhaps I could stun them so that they were not aware of what was about to happen, thereby eliminating any suffering? Like, IDK, a captive bolt or penetrating stunner to the head.

That same argument could be used for a human that was unconscious and not dreaming. As long as they were unaware when you did it, it would be OK. Now it's just a matter of dosing communion wafers....

The argument used against causing pain, is largely used for purposes of definition. Pain indicates, as one part of many, a way of distinguishing whether or not a given organism has sentience: an internal recognition of what effect their environment has on them. Whether it experiences this pain at the time of death is not relevant to the question. The relevance is whether we should act in a manner not considering sentient organisms as having moral interests that require consideration, whether they should be treated as property while within our society (i.e. not "the wild"), and what obligations we have after introducing them into society (as with children). The difficulty comes in where one should place the line of definition of whose interests, if anyone's, to consider. Given that this is generally the definition we apply to people for medical purposes, it seems a reasonable definition to apply to animals as well.

I tend to draw the line instead at whether or not I think the organism has the capacity to recognize my actions internally as a species. This requires, autonomy, adaptive behavior and neural signals. Which would draw the line somewhere in the insect community and within certain sea species. I also think these "lines" should be drawn in a step-wise fashion, granting basic consideration to all within the definition and greater autonomy to more autonomous species as we do with human cognitive capacity. Then again I view rights from the point of view of contractual agreements...