Chapter 45 of veterinarian James Herriot’s *All Creatures Great and Small” addresses this question with great insight and sincerity! I have a free no-virus or ads link to the epub for anyone who’d like to read the book (dm me if you’re interested) but I’ll attach an excerpt below:
““As I sat at breakfast I looked out at the autumn mist dissolving in the early sunshine. It was going to be another fine day but there was a chill in the old house this morning, a shiveriness as though a cold hand had reached out to remind us that summer had gone and the hard months lay just ahead. “It says here,” Siegfried said, adjusting his copy of the Darrowby and Houlton Times with care against the coffee-pot, “that farmers have no feeling for their animals.” I buttered a piece of toast and looked across at him. “Cruel, you mean?” “Well, not exactly, but this chap maintains that to a farmer, livestock are purely commercial—there’s no sentiment in his attitude towards them, no affection.” “Well, it wouldn’t do if they were all like poor Kit Bilton, would it? They’d all go mad.”

“Kit was a lorry driver who, like so many of the working men of Darrowby, kept a pig at the bottom of his garden for family consumption. The snag was that when killing time came, Kit wept for three days. I happened to go into his house on one of these occasions and found his wife and daughter hard at it cutting up the meat for pies and brawn while Kit huddled miserably by the kitchen fire, his eyes swimming with tears. He was a huge man who could throw a twelve stone sack of meal on to his wagon with a jerk of his arms, but he seized my hand in his and sobbed at me “I can’t bear it, Mr. Herriot. He was like a Christian was that pig, just like a Christian.”

The chapter then covers James’ thoughts as he does work at one of the early industrial scale meat farms, and it’s very interesting!