Pain-Free Meat

I recently read of the idea of using our advanced technology to remove the capacity for our farm animals to feel pain. I've thought about whether that would be a good way to go, and I'm kind of on the fence. I see logic in both sides of the argument, and if actually faced with making the final decision I assign slightly higher chance to go down the path of no-pain meat but not completely like it.

So, why would I oppose it? Suffering is bad, right, and I want to reduce suffering in the world? Yes. However, a question to that question is "Is it suffering even if the organism can't actually feel the suffering?" A common comparison is taking a human child, knocking it out, then raping it. It can't feel any discomfort, if you do it right the child won't have any memory of it, what's the harm?

My main source of discomfort is where such actions will lead us. If it becomes common practice to knock people out and do things normally considered abusive to conscious people, how far will it go, and why should we think the abuse will simply stop at unconscious people? If we remove the capacity of animals to feel pain, are we then going to stack pigs as we stack logs, carve them up piece by piece instead of killing them in one go? Are these actions only wrong when done on an organism able to cognitively tell they are harmful? Do they cease being bad if we remove that cognitive ability and leave everything else the same?

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