I'm going to eat bacon. Why? Because it's tasty and I enjoy it. Om Nom Nom. I'm aware that an animal died for my tasty bacon sandwich. I'm ok with that, because I rank the animal's life as less important than my morning.

I'm not going to torture an animal because I derive no pleasure from it. Given the choice, therefore, I would rather the pig lived a happy enough life in a field with little pig huts to live in before it was slaughtered. I'm willing to pay more for that to be the case, because I think it's the decent thing to do.

I don't love animals in general, heck I barely love any humans...

If someone enjoys torturing animals for fun do you feel fine legalizing it?

Dog fights used to be very popular, but for some reason most people find it unacceptable even though those dogs probably had/have better lives than most farm animals.

>> Am I so wrong in the assumption, that if someone claims to love something, he won't hurt it?

In principle, maybe. In practice, we're really good at dealing with contradictory and even conflicting emotions.

For instance, in the past people used to beat up their kids to teach them things. Today, we generally don't- but that's not because we love our kids any more, or less. We just find it unproductive.

So, yes, it's perfectly possible to dearly love an animal and want to eat it- because, after all, that's why we keep farm animals in the first place: to kill them and eat them (and also for their milk, wool, eggs etc). The relationship that makes us love animals is the same one that makes us kill and eat those same animals.

Edit:

>> A mother loses her child (calf), a sister her brother, just because there is someone who wants to eat him/her/it?

If we didn't do that something else would. Animals kill and eat each other all the time and most of them die when something else eats them.

Of course we're special- but even in our specialness we can only subsist on food that is alive- if it's not a calf, it's an egg that cold have hatched into a chicken, or a fruit that could have grown in a beautiful plant. Calfs and lambs can scream and run away but a cabbage is no less alive.

> Am I so wrong in the assumption, that if someone claims to love something, he won't hurt it?

Not directly relevant to farm animals, but how many married couples don't have fights? I don't think that assumption is right.

And when considering raising and killing an animal vs. never having any animal at all, consider the quote "'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all".

> And they still cause suffering. A mother loses her child (calf), a sister her brother

Unless you have the cure to aging, that's going to happen no matter what. In fact, slaughtering means that more of them die at the same time and don't have to go through this suffering.