The vegan position does not spoonfeed you how to live and certainly not how to "consume". It rejects a social order in which humans inhere an entitlement to use nonhuman animal bodies to fulfill our wishes and whims, simply because we are humans and they are "animals". The vegan position rejects dominant carnist ideology which conceives of nonhuman animal bodies as property that we, by birthright as humans, as property owners and paying customers, are entitled to move, extract from, expend, accumulate, destroy, mass produce, conserve and squander as we please. The vegan position is an appeal to confront objectively occurring causes and effects in this world rather than retreat into self-soothing speculations about what animals really want, what they are capable of, what they deserve. Who would've bothered to conceive of the nonhuman as acceptable repositories for endless waste and abuse if it wasn't to meet a desire to waste and abuse without limit? This expansionist hegemonic cultural practice of taking lives and taking from other being's lives without understanding or caring what happens next has created apocalypse for the least powerful among us for a very long time.
Animals of the human species do not have inherent value in the imperial core. Most humans are used and discarded readily, especially if they do not have the material resources to escape punishments and extra especially if they belong to the most animalized and dehumanized categories of this hell culture (e.g: prisoners, drug-users, "crazy" people, transfeminized people, people in the constructed regions of the "Global South" and "Middle East", etc.) That is to say, humanity is conditional even when one is of the human species, and there are some categories of human that cannot escape abjectified dehumanization. At the same time, those who dole out punishments can be limited by the dehumanized person's membership in the human species. The rhetoric and structures that permit tormenting and disappearing someone who is technically human are different than what it takes to do the same to a nonhuman animal. On whole, there are simply fewer barriers to dominating animals not of the human species in an entire, absolute sense. Any asshole with small business money can create an empire of captive animals to disarticulate into salable parts from for as long as he and his business inheritors live. You can be certain these same business owners would farm and slaughter other humans to turn a buck if they could. It takes much more money and power, i.e.: in the form of totalizing structures such as genocides or cults, for humans to exert such control over other humans from birth to death. This world has plenty of genocide and cults and I wont deny the overlaps between how denigrated humans and animals get treated. Just don't deny the power differential between humans and nonhuman animals. Be real about how the structures and tools of animal control and destruction are easy to access for quite a lot of humans.
"Animals", as distinguished from "humans", constitute a class of object in dominant culture. Nearly all animals and their habitats are treated as expendable "renewable resources", up for grabs and to be freely used by whoever claims ownership of the creatures themselves of the habitats they live in. Their prolonged conditions of torture and deaths are allowed to be natural consequences of land grabs, development, and production. Even if some make motions to "minimize" killing and harm, the mass casualties of intensive industrial crop farming, flesh extraction, and resource extraction are considered completely inconsequential. It is normal for certain types of animals to be perpetually confined and forced to breed just to be killed (e.g.: mass-produced chickens, cows, and pigs, laboratory rats and beagles). Animals who are protected by laws or widely beloved are still subject to total human control and killed if they become too inconvenient. Exempting rare cases (e.g.: there are humans actively protecting specific animals from specific forms of abuse), a human only needs capital and can do as they like to their living property in the light of day with protection from cops and courts. The animals are therefore subject to practically limitless interference, manipulation and random cruelty. Forced sterilization, forced insemination, sexual stimulation, penetration, and birth, forced relocation, forced confinement, forced surgery, amputation, and augmentation of bodies, vivisection, skinning and harvesting body parts from living animals, killing for body parts, killing and mutilation for sport are all standard business practices. Any and all of these behaviours can be spun as permissible if there is a benefit for humans (especially convenience and profit) or "humanity" as a whole. Stopping people from carrying these activities out gets you criminalized, as you are interfering with another human being's free enjoyment of their private property and the potential profitability of their business.
For maximum depravity, humans tend to blame animals for their own deaths and tell elaborate and dishonest stories about what happened. The animal was problematic. There was no harm of consequence because the subject of harm was just an animal. An animal who couldn't think or feel, not like a human. We had no choice. It was us or it. Would you rather your kid died? It's okay it didn't suffer because they don't have the emotional capacity to link bodily sensation to a subjective feeling of "pain". It's okay we can replace it. The animal's complete lack of choice in the matter and the obvious truth that the animal would have chosen differently for their own life are not to be addressed.
Ultimately, justifications and discourse don't really matter. As long as there is a profit motive, assembly lines which grind up life and shit out value will be built. The limit of acceptable brutality and coercion shifts according to convenience for whoever is narrating, legitimizing, or executing that brutality/coercion. They will continue even if widely condemned and exposed in media. The assembly line owners and managers will commit to reforms, apologize for travesties then continue to do them anyway, pay fines and pay off politicans, or relocate their operations. The news and outrage cycle moves on. They will continue using and destroying animals until they physically cannot.
Regardless of whatever rationalizations are trending, subjugation and exploitation of both "humans" and "animals" happen for the same reason: the economy only functions because there are classes of expendable objects that can be limitlessly extracted from and abused for limitless production and growth. The Free Market, i.e.: all the structures which exist for upward wealth accumulation, materially depends on mass scale use/abuse of animals, as it is an inevitable consequence of pesticide production, GMO monoculture, animal agriculture, devouring the rainforest, fossil fuel and mineral extraction, global transport networks, imperialist and colonialist domination to enrich the imperial core, police and prison industrial complexes, manufactured xenophobia and racism, structures of "citizenship" and migrant labour exploitation, etc... All of these processes make up the global economy, all depend on one another, and all would cease to function if animal autonomy and integrity of habitats were a non-negotiable condition for anything we did.