Chickens Vs. Cecil the Lion

I read an interesting article recently that makes a pretty strong moral argument, "Eating chicken is morally worse than killing Cecil the Lion" (http://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9074547/cecil-lion-chicken-meat). 


We've all heard about the killing of Cecil the Lion, but this author tries to put the whole situation into perspective and calls attention to the conditions that chickens are raised in for our consumption.  I won't go much into the Cecil issue, as that has been widely discussed everywhere.  However, chickens raised specifically for food are kept in terrible living conditions and fed constantly to increase their size.  This has some clear moral issues, as outlined in the article, because the maltreatment of animals, regardless of their "purpose," is certainly morally deplorable.  The article doesn't really go much further than that though, pointing out how many billions of chickens are killed each year for food.  But it doesn't really look at what would happen if that much food is removed from our food supply.  It would be severely detrimental for sure.  I'm not trying to argue for the continued maltreatment of those animals, as we should definitely be making serious efforts to improve the conditions the chickens are raised in, and improvements have been made.  Not all farms are as terrible as the ones shown in the article, and we need to try to support the better ones to set a better precedent.