Is eating meat ethical?

I recently read 'The Lives of Animals' by JM Coetzee, which is really just a rather lucid defense of vegetarianism. Reading the book motivated me to do some thinking on the issue of whether or not it is moral to eat meat.

I don't buy the argument that simply killing an animal is cruel. Animals get killed in their natural habitats all the time and in ways that are often more painful than the (relative) mercy of slaughterhouse. Death is a natural part of live and is in itself not inherently cruel or aborant.

What does disturb me ( and Coetzee, judging from his book) is the conditions under which the animals are forced to live. Take the example of pigs- extremely intelligent and sensitive creatures, so near in nature to us that their organs can be used in certain transplant operations. In many industrial farms pigs are kept in very small places, forced to live in their own muck. The only time that they see the light of day is just before they are slaughtered. Living in an industrial pig barn must be as close to Hell as we are ever likely to see- hot, noisy, lightless.

By buying meat products we are complicit in this crime. The fact that it is committed against animals might be rationalized away. But I believe that any human being, with a functioning conscience, cannot but be moved ( on a very primal level) by the sight of an animals forced to live in a dark, crowded deathcamp. The revulsion is devoid of intellect- there is no good reason why we should want to help the chicken forced to live in a post box and be force fed. But for some reason we do.

I think that the moral path lies in eating only free range produce- i.e. that produced sans the use of the sorts of methods made famous by Auswitz.