I believe you can advocate for animal rights and still eat meat....just as you can advocate for justice and work at the top floor of the justice Department... Humans have the wonderfully convenient capacity for hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance and diabolical duplicity.
Well, of course you can do whatever you want. But if your own tenets that you profess and recommend to others are bound to get you killed once taken to their obvious conclusions, then there's something wrong with your system of ethics.
Joking aside, "rights" can mean anything to anyone. For the most part even our most cherished human rights are more guidelines than absolutes.
Just like some people can believe the Earth is flat when it is round, or some can believe chemical toxins are beneficial to our health, so too can plenty of people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what rights are, or what rights are correct. Remember that referring to "rights" is also a way of saying "what is right". There's only one set of rights that is correct for humans under a strictly hunter-gatherer, communal system of production, and only one, strictly opposite set of rights that is correct for humans living under an agricultural, individualistic, trade-based system of production. There can be minor disagreements as regards the specifics of how to apply those rights in very particular circumstances, but the tenets are set in stone, and they can be derived logically, using nothing other than our own understanding of what it means to be human.
From the perspective of a mindful meat eater "animal rights" means good animal husbandry. Insuring a quality standard of life for the animals raised for meat, while they live, and giving them a quick death without prolonged and cruel suffering, when they are harvested.
The problem here is that you're using a term that means something for humans, and using it to mean something completely different for animals, all while attempting to reconcile the two in some way. This is bound to get you in trouble, as the contradictions abound and "rebels" who think they have everything figured out start killing meat eating humans in an attempt to "defend animal rights"... This is coming, and we should recognize it as possibly the biggest threat to humanity in the coming decades, or perhaps even centuries. As long as these rebels are treated as the terrorists they are, life will continue to be bearable, but once these rebels get a hold of the oppressive, criminal arm of the State, there will be dark times for many of us.
There is also a more eastern perspective to consider that denies the separation from the self and the outside world, so to kill and consume life, is to kill and devour a part of your self....This view goes way beyond the limited notions of individual rights, and chooses to focus more on respecting the interconnectedness between self and other, human/animal, or predator/prey. Violation of our food animals basic "humane" living standards will give rise to negative Karma in the flesh, and will have to be payed for with future negative Karma, by those who blindly feed upon their own cruelty...
These religions are a part of the problem, too. They have some fundamentally anti-human tenets within their teachings. However, they have managed to keep those tenets in check for millenia, whereas the more virulent radical veganism ideology continues to prove itself more dangerous every day.
For me Humane is a subjective term, in which the individual uses human judgement to decide what conditions are conducive for maximum health and minimal suffering, of another being. Being humane in regards to livestock is to put yourself in the animals position?? For example... If you were a Sheep in a shepherd's flock, you wouldn't have any of these high falutin thoughts, or agony over injustice.... so what would be considered human to Ewe would be much different from what is humane to me.
If I were a sheep that was going to be eventually slaughtered and eaten... I would hope that I was given good pasture to eat, fresh water, protection from wild beast, the ability to move free...to spend what short time I have without suffering or trama....spending a good many beautiful days grazing, breeding, ruminating and bleeting as sheep do...blissfully unaware of the hungry reapers watch.
Just like the hunters of old put themselves in their prey's position only to figure out how to predict its movements in order to best achieve a kill so they can eat their flesh, so too animal husbandry should concern itself with putting oneself in the animals' position only insofar as it refers to maintaining optimal health and optimal use of resources for those animals, so that their flesh is more abundant and more nourishing to us.
Again, animals should be kept in healthy conditions for the benefit of the meat and the health of the meat eating humans, not for the benefit of the animals in and of themselves.
Life is a struggle for survival and reproduction. Every animal wants to win. It's not possible for the farmer to guarantee each of its rams will be able to survive and reproduce, as inherently some will be able to mate more than the others. By selecting those rams that will make offspring that is able to produce more quantity of more nourishing meat in a shorter amount of time and with a smaller amount of food input, and also selecting for docility which will make his flock more manageable, he is doing something good for humans, but you could argue he is doing something "bad" for the sheep. That's not a problem, because our only ultimate concern should be about human health and wellbeing.
