Feeling some level of guilt for killing a living animal to eat is normal and nothing new to human behavior. In hunter-gatherer cultures, long practiced various rituals to thank animals for providing sustenance and even to apologize to them. The problem today is (and what Diana and Robb point out in Sacred Cow) is that modern humans have become too separated from nature. Humanity’s greatest hubris is thinking it is somehow separate from the cycle of life on the planet. While diet is a personal choice, I don’t see the solution as veganism. I see the solution as re-connecting ourselves with nature and and bringing back a reverent respect for the life on this planet.

See this excerpt from an article about persistence hunting:

https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/fragments-of-the-hunt-persistence-hunting-tracking-and-prehistoric-art

“Liebenberg participated in and recorded a few of the last ever persistence hunts that took place,” says Ijäs. “He saw how a hunter would track an antelope for many hours in the hot sun, driving both himself and the animal to the point of exhaustion. Eventually the animal would simply stop, wait and allow itself to be killed from close proximity with a spear – in what would be almost a ceremonial event.”

“Liebenberg, who became very immersed in the experience, wrote that during the persistence hunt he wasn’t thinking of himself as separate from the animal anymore,” says Ijäs. “He had a very powerful out of body experience where he felt that the hunter and the hunted became one. In a sense, the only way to kill the animal was to become the animal. To assume the responsibility of taking the animal’s being into oneself in order to kill it.”

“There is no clear separation between the ceremony and the hunt for hunter gatherers like the San people of the Kalahari. I believe that this transcendent experience is what is being depicted in the rock art in the Drakensberg and several other places around the world,” concludes Ijäs. “The art shows the deep bond between the hunter and the hunted, the inter-connectedness which the world was viewed, and the profound respect that people had for the taking of life.”