Or at least that’s the result of a poll from the Farm Bureau, as reported by Reason Magazine.
Through an innovative survey question, the suffering of one human was found to be equivalent to the suffering of 11,500 farm animals, and a majority of respondents felt that farmers should be compensated if forced to comply with higher farm animal welfare standards.
While this does not imply that farm animal welfare is not important, it does imply when forming public policy, the interests of farm animals take a backseat to the interest of humans. Proposed policies that raise food costs leave consumers with less money for funding programs benefiting humans. For example, with rising health care costs, every extra dollar spent on food is one less dollar for doctor visits and surgeries. Given that the welfare of humans is of far more concern than the welfare of animals, such tradeoffs should be seriously weighed by policy makers.
The second lesson is that consumers understand animal welfare is a result of their shopping decisions, in addition to farmer decisions. A majority of consumers believe their personal food choices have a large impact on the well-being of farm animals, and that if consumers desire higher animal welfare standards, food companies will provide it. Thus, when consumers choose to purchase traditional meat instead of more expensive meat raised under alternative production systems (e.g. organic meat or free-range meat), they understand that their purchase directly determines the level of animal care provided. If consumers are happy purchasing traditional meat, this signifies they approve of the animal care provided on traditional farms.
What this tells me is that our natural moral intuition tells us that the suffering of farm animals is less important than the suffering of human beings. This seems to support the moral thesis that it is immoral to put the well-being of farm animals above that of humans, which is contrary to the ethical veg*nist belief that human well-being is not as important as that of farm animals.
The other interesting point raised by this poll is the one made in the quote above. Any extra money spent on food because of “animal rights” is money that cannot be used to help other human beings, including oneself. If we have to choose between human health care and cow health care, the choice, for most people, is fairly straighforward.
The Prime Directive 
I think Martin Heidigger the philosopher has illustrated how we see everything as a tool to be utilized, including man, animals and the rest of nature without ‘responsibility’ or obligations. This attitude basically stems from atheism, where man is said to be self-governed, self-owned. Most traditional societies respected nature and only utilized it knowing that they had responsibility towards future generations.
There is no dilemma between human/animal welfare. Humans are sovreign over the earth, however they have responsibility towards nature and animals, use them but without overstepping the mark. Industrial farming methods and induced industrial scale exploitation of nature because of the processes of capitalism are the problem. The drive towards fewer and fewer small scale farms and fewer and fewer large scale farms taking over is the problem. This is driven by capitalist finance, usury, fractional reserve banking and what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon called ‘the banker sect’.