Animals deserve a dignified death

Growing up in a farming community I was exposed to a lot of the ways in which cattle or pigs were slaughtered. I always knew what was inside of a hot dog, I knew how the animals were killed and disposed of, but for one reason or the other I have always chosen to turn the other way when consuming meat. Although I realize where the particular meat may be coming from and how the particular animal may have been raised and sacrificed for my consumption, I think it’s a natural way of life. I respect the animal from which the food came from and I understand that those beings have a destiny, sadly for them that it is our stomachs. This sounds bad, but it’s unavoidable, without man’s domestication of these animals they wouldn’t even be here. These animals would not make it in the wild and would die much more gruesome deaths, hunted and eaten alive perhaps by a predator.
To categorize our consumption of animals as evil or barbaric goes against some very basic laws of nature. The hunter and the hunted have existed here on Earth even in the earliest stages of life. They have developed and evolved, adapting to their unpredictable worldly environment. Yet even through all that unpredictable stuff on earth they still manage to exist in nature today. It’s survival of the fittest, the weak die along the way. Those who are able to adapt and evolve luck out and survive.
I do however heavily disagree with the cruel lives some of these animals are forced to live, and with the gruesome deaths they experience. I believe that these animals do have sentient thoughts and must feel some sort of deprivation of life. I doubt that a hen which cannot flap its wings throughout the day or night or ever once inside that cage is happy at all. They deserve the right to roam and pick at real worms from the ground, and feel the soil beneath them. Even if they have never known the feeling, they deserve a chance to experience it. Eventually when the time comes (and this is crucial), they should serve their purpose on the food chain, exiting this earth a quick and painless way. The animals should be subject to a painless death simply because if there is no purpose for a bloody death, why entitle it? There is no need to put the animal through such agony and pain; that would truly be a barbaric act.
I also realize that at times such accommodations toward the animals can be expensive, so again there is a problem. I find it funny how one of the solutions suggested at the Polyface farm for presenting the animal’s dignified death is by installing glass walls so as to be noticeable by the public.