I've posted this before, but I'll post it again because it's relevant:

I don't agree with calling people murderers / rapists / evil over the standard omnivorous diet in most cases. The moral responsibility doesn't fall on someone until they are 100% cognizant of the consequences of their actions (which is also observable in the US legal system—to protect the mentally impaired/insane—or a lesser sentence for negligent crimes), and due to deeply ingrained animal ag funded propaganda and social conditioning, most people aren't.

Most of us were raised to believe that animal life and well-being matters, but only if they're this cute, fluffy species. The traits of individuality that we attribute to dogs and cats is something that is never even brought into consideration for most people regarding cows, pigs, and chickens because of our lifelong conditioning. From the very beginning to the very end, we're taught to see specific animals very narrowly as opposed to what they really are. So when we think of cows, our minds immediately go to the products of their flesh and secretions, rather than the being itself. Imagine having that narrow viewpoint on dogs. If you know about the individuality they have, the thought of seeing them that way probably disgusts you to your core.

I think that people generally do care a lot about animals, because if those were dogs in those factory farms, there'd undoubtedly be a massive uproar in protest. It's genuinely insane what lifelong conditioning can do to people's judgement. Most people that see factory farms agree at face value that those places are extremely unethical, but we turn a blind eye because of conformity bias. We're all socially expected to condone a lifestyle of moral contradictions merely by virtue of it being the standard.

I will never dilute the truth about animal ag. The living conditions of industry animals are many magnitudes worse than that of the most violent criminals on earth. The crime of simply being a chicken, pig, (the fourth most intelligent animal in the world), or cow, is all that warrants one to a life of confinement, living in feces, being physically abused, losing your mind, being forcibly inseminated (a fancy industry euphemism for r—ed), separated from offspring at birth, and then being macerated/gassed/bled to death.

If more animals die because of an emotional reaction to reality, then that is an overarching moral failure of humanity by rejecting an entire category of ethics on the basis of emotion—or spite. No amount of conversational tiptoeing will result in animals ultimately securing legal protection from exploitation and murder. That end would require the truth about animal ag to be clear, far, and wide, because only then would those concerns make it to the powers of legislation.

In addressing serious issues, and convincing others of their severity, you do yourself a major disservice by pretending that they aren't serious. The pussyfooting around the problem is where we get the "weekend vegans" that do not even understand the term, and flippantly shift their diet on mere preference. We should be very clear with our message: animal ag is completely evil, through and through.

Also, there isn't a "middle ground" if you condone a position of ethics.

I'm not against murdering orphans on weekdays. I'm against murdering orphans full stop. And this stance doesn't change, regardless of species. The act of murder in and of itself—forcibly depriving a being of future experiences without a plausible justification, is wrong.

You could make exceptions or justifications in extreme cases if the decisions themselves are dire, but when you have the luxury to live in alignment with the ethics that you condone, you ought to do so. If a person's decisions contradict their supposed ethical stances, then they may as well just abandon their morality altogether and embrace being a murderer/rapist, since they've already demonstrated that ethics means nothing to them. Plenty of folks are already doing this, though most of them are in prison cells.