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An animal should never be just a dispensable, replaceable property. The difference between various consciousnesses - my table, the living tree, the sentient creature, the human being may be obvious but each level of consciousness deserves respect.
There’s a lot of difference between an abusive relationship and a loving one, between the parasitic and the symbiotic. It seems that we humans haven’t yet learnt how to be symbiotic with those animals which happen to be useful to us. And as for having consideration for other levels of consciousness, forget it.
Valuable resources and useful animals we take. We think - they are ‘there for the taking’ ... it’s all part of the rich bounty to which we’re entitled. And with a mixture of minimal respect, lack of appreciation for what we already have and greed for more, it leads us to never be satisfied. Anything we want we take. We use it up and keep wanting more ... so we graduate towards indifference, then abuse and then alienation.
The deadliest disease amongst humans is dissatisfaction. We open the box on Christmas Day, containing a beautiful puppy dog ... and six months later we’re off on our holidays and taking the puppy (now-dog) to the vets to be put down.
If we tire of something we develop a contempt for it so that we can distance ourselves from it, in this case the no-longer-so-cute dog. Any similarity between human and victims is downgraded so that we can dispose of it or abuse it with better conscience and justification.
As for so called ‘food animals’ we see no similarity at all between ourselves and them – they become so downgraded in our minds that we don’t have any need to consider them as beings at all. In fact they are merely alive in order to make them useful to us dead.
As addicts of animal products, like anyone addicted to anything, we must be assured of supply, so the chain of animal to farmer to animal-industry to shop keeper, is a line of service set up to maintain our lifestyle. One faulty link and it’s catastrophe - imagine, for instance, a shop being out of ice cream. Unthinkable!