I am hypocritical, in that I can't handle slaying anything but explicitly evil invertebrates (horseflies, mosquitoes), or even finding it dead, yet I'm not a vegetarian.

I had to cut down two healthy trees last month, too, because they were crowding and rotting our roof. I felt awful, evil, destructive. I've never felt the same with regards to other plants because... I guess I feel it's their purpose. We're not coming to plants minding their own business and destroying them, we're making a place for them, planting them, growing them, harvesting them, and saving seeds to continue the cycle, actually helping them proliferate overall. With more hesitation, the same concept applies to farmed animals. If nobody wanted to eat farm animals, after all, they would become extinct.

Really, I've got one set of standards intellectually - I don't believe, intellectually, that killing animals for food is wrong. (I do believe that it is wrong to treat them indecently while they're alive, so I do try harder and harder to stick to meat that I know wasn't factory-farmed.) But the emotional standards kick in for anything I'd have to do personally.