Factory Farming (Animal Rights)

From watching videos and reading some books it seems clear that the modern factory farm industry is and has been conducting a Holocaust thousands/millions of times over [disclaimer: this is assuming animal consciousness/pain is within 1/100 of that experienced by humans, which I think most people, especially pet owners, would agree with]. But because animals have no ability to lobby others for help, and b/c there's no one out there who has an incentive to go after the people who are harming the animals, nothing is going to happen for a long time. The same thing has happened to one extent or another to lots of other groups: the Jews in Europe, gay/minority/female people in the US and elsewhere, etc.

How to fix what is happening:

try to change nations' cultural eating habits to a more plant-based diet - this wouldn't completely solve the problem on its own but could help. of course, achieving this would be a huge undertaking on its own and who knows how realistic an objective it is. Interestingly enough, this would prob. also have huge health benefits for people.
improve animals' lives by letting them live in fields, etc. - this is what whole foods has been doing. but the problem is that there will continue to be an incentive to produce cheaper meat (at the cost of the animals' quality of life) for people who don't care.
outlaw certain practices (eg keeping animals in cages their whole lives) - but it is probably currently politically impossible to get laws like that passed in the US (and may continue to be impossible for the next 50-100 years). and even if they're passed in the US, other countries will continue to have an incentive to produce meat as cheaply as possible.
create genetically-engineered animals that are basically brain-dead - this is not a very pleasant solution to think about but it is actually one of the first things I thought of when I first started thinking about this issue at length in high school. a few years later i found a philosophy book in barnes & noble that mentioned the same idea. one obvious problem is the question of how difficult/expensive it would be to figure out how to create such creatures. another problem is the question of whether the changes we make to their genes would have unintended consequences on the health of the animal and/or the quality of the meat; some people are very worried nowadays about genetically-engineered corn. a third problem is that it probably wouldn't make people feel warm and fuzzy inside to think about such creatures; so even if the feelings of pain are removed from the animals, the humans' feelings of compassion would not be relieved b/c people would still feel bad or weirded out or disgusted.
keep animals drugged their whole lives so they don't feel any pain - this idea is similar to the genetic-engineering one, with the same problems.

Sources of information on this topic:

Eating Animals by Jonathan Foer - I remember finding this alright; I think I remember it having some good information, but I think I also remember not being blown away by it. The book is about the author's struggle to decide whether to be vegetarian/vegan since he had become a father wanted to set a good example. It includes a bunch of information that he found out about how our meat is produced. The main thing I took away from it was that modern factory farming is very, very different from the way meat had been produced in the past (it seems far more cruel now), and the number of animals being killed every year is staggering (in the billions).

Meet Your Meat (from PETA, narrated by Alec Baldwin)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBgaRD0fzzk

The Foie Gras Assembly Line
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IWN8UGDyC0

Shocking Animal Cruelty at Tyson Foods Supplier
http://video.humanesociety.org/video/62 ... -Supplier/