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It's a bit of both. It's not just the bullet in the heart part. It's the disecting of it. The fact that, again, it's not just muscle and meat, you have to actively cut away the organs, which are very much like your own. And there must be a reason for a dislike of touching gore. My thought is that it trivializes the life process, by stripping away the things that make that deer alive says to me "this is it, flesh and bone, nothing more.", as a metaphor of all life and all lives. A scary, nihilistic thought. And if that is true, and that is why I fear cutting open an animal, why should I allow animal lives to be destroyed on my behalf? If I can't deal with thinking about nihilism, why should I force animals into my nihilistic fear? (meaning, if I am afraid of death, why should I put them through death)

Disecting doesn't really phase me at all.
I'm pretty sure I'd be able to get through the disection part of your (divineseraph) idea without a hitch.
The killing of the animal is the part that would trip me up.
I couldn't hunt anything. I'd probably break down in tears just being out in the woods with a gun.

But I like your idea. I think it's something everyone who enjoys eating meat should think about.

I don't really see a problem with any of these situations. At first glance, they do seem to be conflicting. But taking them a bit deeper, they're just two different values that you wouldn't expect to be found together. That doesn' t mean they contradict or don't make sense.

Using the pro-choice one as an example, just because it's easier to explain, that's just a person who very much values personal rights. They don't agree with abortion and probably wish it didn't happen, but they're for protecting the individual rights that allow abortion to exist, and thus they're for keeping abortion legal.
Kind of like that "I may not agree with what you said, but I'll fight to the death to protect your right to say it" thing. (Wasn't that Voltaire?...)

I don't think I explained this very well, actually. confused

And this is why I really want to be able to raise my own livestock (chickens or other tasty fowl at the very least). Because if I'm not willing to participate, or at least understand, how an animal dies, I shouldn't be willing to eat it. Also, I would want to raise organic animals, and eggs/dairy products because they taste way better.

I'd like to go hunting, but I would need to learn to shoot first. I think I would be okay killing and butchering an animal, as I've dealt with many a dead critter growing up in the country with dogs, as well as roadkill.

I was fine dissecting fetal pigs in high school. I thought it was wonderfully interesting, since they are supposed to be very similar to humans on the inside.

Really? My biology teacher would allow students to write a report instead of dissecting. I guess I figured that this was pretty common.

Oh, my Biology teacher had been teaching since, like, before I had been alive. He was pretty awesome, and we also used to chat after class. We dissected fetal pigs because he didn't want to have frogs or rats killed so we could cut them up.

I also loved that the first day we started the evolution section, he said outright that some people believe that God created everything, but we weren't going to be looking at why everything came to be the way it is, but how that happened. I thought that was a really good way to put it.