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Broadly that things will die anyways, and that the only way to prevent this altogether is eliminate life - which seems a far worse outcome than removing death. For most classes of animals that we eat, they would only exist if we farmed them, otherwise the number of their species in the wild would be effectively zero. This would not be matched by an increase in the number of members of any other species. It would be precisely and completely an elimination of lives, with no commensurate increase in life.
For animals that have been killed via hunting them in the wild, the argument would go that some level of predation is a natural part of the life cycle of such animals. A deer being picked off by wolves, or being picked off by a hunter, is not such a large change. Often, hunting is a way to prevent the numbers of certain species from increasing too much, which will have damaging effects on the rest of the ecosystem.
The exception to this general line of thinking is in cases where the life of the animal is so bad as to be not worth living, where the animal would in fact be better off not existing at all. This might be the case for certain forms of factory farming, but I don't believe it is the case for most of the meat that we consume. If it is, the would-be vegetarian could elect to procure their meat from sources that practice forms of farming they consider ethical.
Overall, this is pretty much my position but plenty of pig and poultry farming is genuinely horrendous.
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Using the argument for "more lives is better", would it be fine if humans were farmed by Alien Human Eaters if it resulted in the human population being 1000x larger than it is now?
alignment claim: non-vegetarian.
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