Not a cop out. Of course I eat meat. If you are hunting for food, that's one thing. If you are hunting for trophies or just because you enjoy killing things, that's another.
It is said that the hunters in some Indian tribes would apologize to the spirit of the animal when they killed it for their food. That lends a certain amount of perspective to the act.
And, of course, animals kill each other. What goes through their minds when they do so is, at this time, unknowable.
Which brings up another question: How is it that we have no serious research programs to learn how to actually communicate with the "lower" forms of life on this world? The last I heard was John Lilly had done years of research on dolphin speech (in the 60s), and was roundly derided as a nut by the PTB.