No, but cows, pigs, hens and so on are being systematically chopped up for the gustatory pleasure of people who could get their protein elsewhere. For free-range, humanely slaughtered livestock you could make an argument that this is a net utility gain for them, since they wouldn't exist otherwise, but the same cannot be said for battery animals.
But driving this reasoning to its logical conclusion you get a lot of strange results.
The premise is that humans are differnt from animals in that they know that they inflict suffering and are thus able to change it, and according to some ethics have to.
Actually this would be kind of a disadvantage of knowledge. There was a not so recent game theoretic post about situations where if you know more you have to choose probabilistically to win on average whereas those who don't know will always choose defect and thus reap a higher benefit than you - except if ...
Haven't had one of these for awhile. This thread is for questions or comments that you've felt silly about not knowing/understanding. Let's try to exchange info that seems obvious, knowing that due to the illusion of transparency it really isn't so obvious!