But obviously, factory farm animals feel more pain than crickets. The question is just how much pain?
This paper is far from a complete answer, but it may help:
If there were no farm cows and no farmers, but only wild bisons watched over by bears and wolfs —
would there be less pain in the world? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But you can't just eliminate the farm chickens and pretend everything would be hunky-dory then.
This isn't a dichotomy. We can farm animals while making their lives reasonably comfortable. Their moments of pain would be few up to and until they reach the age for slaughter, which itself can be made stress-free and painless.
Here in Brazil, for example, we have huge ranches where cattle move around freely. Cramping them all in a tiny area to maximize productivity at the cost of making their lives extremely uncomfortable, as in the US factory farm system, may happen here, but I'm not personally aware of it so unusual that is. The US could do it the same way, as it isn't like the country lacks territory where cattle could roam freely, but since this isn't required by law, and factory farming is more profitable, this is rare, with the end result of free-roaming meat being sold at a much higher premium than it should.
Brazilian chickens, on the other hand, are typically cramped together the same as in the US, unless one opts to buy eggs from small family-owned farms, who mostly let them roam freely.
For context, I'm trying to get a sense of how bad factory farming is (and, by extension, our treatment of animals more generally). It seems obvious that factory farm animals feel some pain, but do we have any sense of how much?
Let's say that a cricket can feel, at the absolute most, the pain that a human feels when pinched lightly on the hand. I consider this negligible (assume it doesn't increase in intensity after the first pinch). Now say, hypothetically, that all factory farm animals could feel, at most, no more than this cricket. And at that low threshold, I don't think I care if the pain is aggregated, even if it's a trillion crickets. Hurray! Moral catastrophe averted; I could now consume animal products with zero reservations as to their welfare (though there are still other considerations like climate change).
But obviously, factory farm animals feel more pain than crickets. The question is just how much pain?
To what extent can we measure pain in beings that can't report, through language, their conscious states?