I think it's pretty funny how people on Neogaf are shocked.
Yeah, we are killing animals for meat and other products like leather. And killing an animal is cruel not because we are using spears but we take the life of an animal. To say my meat is "better" because the animal was killed with a bolt gun is just a cheap placebo.
I think you're right that killing is killing, but I don't think anyone here is talking about meat or which kinds of meat are better... I think people just appreciate that there's such thing as a quick death, and such thing as a barbaric death / remorseless butchering...
If there were no meaningful difference in how you perform a killing, people would be performing euthanasia on the terminally ill by stabbing them in the gut, plus a few times in the neck and around the eye sockets... maybe severing an artery just to watch them bleed out, maybe strangling them... or drowning them. None of us would prefer being shot to being stabbed 30+ times or run down by a vehicle so we lay paralysed and dying in the middle of a road while the emergency services struggle to get there in time...
there's a difference. I accept that there is a pecking order on the tree of life, and that we're top of it and that this stuff happens -- it just still saddened me to see some of those animals take so many wounds before going down. They suffered before the end.