I would hardly call it "utterly irrelevant" that in a discussion about "killing birds is bad" someone mentions that it is not usually considered bad to kill birds for food.
Killing wild birds accidentally is completely different from raising and bucthering birds for food, from virtually any point of view I can imagine. People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig, and might still consider sport hunting wild boars to be barbaric.
Life is still life, pain(not only death) caused needlessly whether windmills or in factory farms is still cruel. Birds are intelligent, curious, emotional, they are social animals and get depressed.
Other attributes the bird may have (wild/bred) or species (rare/common) has no bearing on the pain and kind of death they suffer. The importance of those attributes is lens we see from, it does not change their suffering.
> People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig
It doesn't make it acceptable to view life raised for food[2] as a lesser (therefore ok to be tortured) than other life because they are pets, merely because it is common practice.
How is it different than valuing human life was valued differently in age of slavery or even today if you say correlate level of aid, support, news coverage or empathy to simple numbers on human conflict impact[1].
[2] The argument here is not becoming vegetarian, it is about not torturing needlessly what we need to eat. The human equivalent is akin to not following Geneva conventions in a war not abolish war altogether, while ideal everyone agrees is not practical today.
"completely different" and "utterly irrelevant" are not the same thing. They also aren't completely different. They have things in common (killing and harming birds).
You're trying to turn "I don't care about that" into "it's logically incorrect to care about that" which is not a game you can win.
