My answer comes from the perspective of a vegetarian who is so just because I don't like meat, though of course most of my family and friends do a great deal, I've helped out farming, and I can appreciate the artistry and human ingenuity that has gone into production and preparation over the millennia. I have no moral objection to it, but neither would it bother me if it wasn't on the menu as long as other good options were.

>How can you be against cruelty to animals and still regularly consume meat?

Sincere answer: I don't see how this is the slightest bit different from "how can you be against rampant pollution but still use a computer" or "how can you be against torture but still support a police force" or "how can you be against war crimes but still support going to war" or any of an endless number of scenarios where unpleasant choices must be made but harm reduction can still be practiced. I think you've either set up a false dichotomy and argument from perfection, or you're engaging in circular definitions by saying "cruelty" is literally "any consumption of meat" as opposed to most people seeing a line between wanton cruelty and merely raising something to kill it in a more humane way.

>There are other equally ethical considerations: global warming, land use, energy/water use, etc. I feel that any one of these should give most people pause.

I don't consider a single one of those ethical considerations inherent to meat, they're market failures that we should working on correcting themselves (and preferably as part of a larger framework addressing the same issues everywhere). Global warming could have been entirely prevented with a proper carbon pricing scheme and could still be heavily reduced with one (though some sort of tax is now needed as well to deal with previous externalities). The "value" of land use and resource use is highly subjective, so long as we're pricing in the costs properly it should be up to individuals how they want to spend their extra income. Meat could well be a luxury, but we have lots of luxuries and I strongly dislike the game of "my luxury is more moral then yours!" which is inevitably an argument on a foundation of sand and makes everyone rightly angry to no purpose.

Maybe you honestly don't mean it that way, and I don't wish to attack your character and would certainly be interested in reading your replies as well. But over the years I've found lines of questioning like yours to often be weak self-justification to come up with "rational arguments" about something where really the person just feels it's yucky and doesn't like it themselves. But "ban this because I think it's yucky" doesn't generally work except for dictators, so they post hoc find something else, but rather then simply trying to deal with the actual objective problems they find as reasons they loop that back to arguing against what they find yucky. I'm not saying that makes someone a bad person either! Humans do that sort of reasoning a lot, finding justifications for how they really wanted to act anyway, I know I fall into that trap with some regularity and possibly always will. But I still think it's worth trying to step back and consider what problem you're really trying to solve and being honest about that.

Oppose "cruelty"? This will probably be the hardest because it gets into highly subjective arguments, but there is some level here that basically everyone can agree on even at cost so find that and require it. Oppose carbon (or equivalent) release? Support putting a price on that equivalent to the cost of removing it industrially plus margin. Worried about pollution? Require water leaving farms to have equivalent levels of contaminants as water entering (including rain). Etc.

But if you take all that and then come up with "all of you should stop eating meat" people, formally or not, will have a sense you're talking BS and hear "I don't like what you like conform to me" because there are other solutions to the stated goals.