The Fault of Davis

I was going to bring this up on Friday, but we were pressed for time so I figured it would be better placed here.

I had a major point of contention regarding Steven Davis. He simply stated that "dead is dead" when it comes to animal consumption. However, he touches upon the issue of animal suffering as key to the determination of whether or not animals should be consumed. Why consider such suffering when a death is a death? I feel as if such a statement invalidates his entire argument.

From Davis' point of view, it seems that pain would be your moral "contingency". If you are inflicting excess pain, then you are violating moral obligations to beings. And we did assign such status to animals if I recall. But then Davis seems to believe that the level of pain is also somehow irrelevant in the long run as the animal will be dead anyways.

For me, a death is not a death. You cannot equate the two. The manner in which death came about can differ in a spectrum of ways. A dog that dies of natural causes and a chicken that was raised without legs to be slaughtered are not the same thing. Your moral contingency does not hinge as much on the consumption of the animal, maybe so much as the suffering indeed. We owe good long lives to all beings, so how does one argue for "death is death"? Imagine the chaos, the breakdown of society, etc. We would not apply any other such term to society or reality, so why it is done here I am unsure.

But is death just that: death? Or can we assign different levels? And is the status at death the true determination of moral obligations?