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Most people would draw a contrast between executing a violent criminal, a fight to the death between able bodied men, and brutally slaughtering a pig in disgusting industrial conditions.
"Brutally" slaughtering a pig in "disgusting" "industrial" conditions? Those are very subjective words. The pig doesn't care that it's not being given a dignified sendoff by its loving family at the end of a fulfilled life in a beautiful grassy glade with dandelions wafting in the breeze. Humans fear death; animals don't even understand the concept. As long as we kill them quickly, I really don't give a shit how it's done.
Which isn't to say I don't have concerns about factory farming. The rest of the pig's life may be filled with suffering, and (IMO) we're rich enough, as a society, to do better. My morality-o-meter is ok with sacrificing, say, 0.01% of value to humans to improve the life of pigs by 500%.
The pig in fact does care about this, you don't need to be a human or even understand the concept of death to feel stressed in an industrial slaughterhouse.
Citation needed...? It's a little hard to ask the pig. And even if true, should I care overmuch that the pig "feels stressed" for the last hour of its life? Humans go through worse (to say nothing of how animals die in nature!). If you want me to care about animal welfare, you should focus on the part that really matters - the life the pig lived - rather than the lurid, but ultimately unimportant, details of its death.
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We have the Saw movies and other lovely examples of splatterpunk and torture porn. I don't think there's as much of a contrast as we'd all hope would prevail. The gory death of a pig and the gory death of a criminal that society has declared to be less than human, what's the major difference?
The difference is that Saw is fiction and the pig is innocent of any crime.
Yes, but, extremely guilty of being full of pork.
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People will certainly distinguish between the three in some ways. I agree with @FarNearEverywhere that it's far from certain whether "blasting" imagery of any of them would result in more or less support.
True, but there is already potentially broad support for limiting factory farming.
I do not believe there is broad support for the effects of significantly limiting factory farming: less meat available and far higher prices.
Most Americans aren't political, don't care about broader issues, and just want to hang out with their friends and "watch the game". They care about social signaling, so they'll say they're against factory farming when that seems like what they're supposed to say. I would not count on them to maintain that stance once the effects of significantly limiting factory farming become apparent.
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