Given people grew animals for eating for centuries and generally were more cruel to them then we are , I doubt.

> and generally were more cruel to them then we are

Strongly disagree with this part of your statement. The scale of suffering from industrial animal processing far exceeds anything from past centuries. The one-on-one cruelty of past centuries exists today as well (there are plenty of hidden camera videos to that effect), but what's really different is that now we treat animals as if they are mere inputs to industrial processes, as if they have no feelings or emotions or capacity for suffering.

In past centuries, chickens roamed free, sheep and cattle grazed on fields, etc. It was an idyllic experience compared to today's factory farm hellscape.

We are orders of magnitude more cruel to factory farmed animals than farming at any other point in history.

Those people were a lot more desperate for food than we were too, though.