Some people might say that our instincts are often wrong. A lot of people use tricks to do something other than what their emotions are telling them. They get angry and contain it. They feel jealous that someone else is getting attention and ignore it. We tend to divide emotions into bad ones like that and good ones like empathy, but there's an argument to be made that the natural empathy we feel toward animals is wrong in some cases and should be suppressed. Taken to its extreme, we'd end up with a world where we tried to save everything, even every insect, and we'd end up with an unsustainable world or at best a planet-sized zoo where everything was controlled and coddled. Maybe the natural world, as messy and bloody as it is, is better than one in which every living thing is protected and loved. Maybe empathy is an emotion that was beneficial to our evolution as mammals but has grown out of control as we gained intelligence and the ability to see beyond our family and clan needs and we're better off slaughtering animals which we raise because at least they get to live better lives than any animal would live in the wild before that slaughter comes, making way for a new generation to be raised in a pastoral situation.

I'm only speaking in hypotheticals because I'm also a vegetarian and don't personally subscribe to that idea, but I think it's not necessarily cut and dry that avoiding killing for food is absolutely the right thing to do. Personally, I think the normalization of dominating animals is what led to a lot of bad behaviors toward humans like slavery and subjugation and that we would be better off cultivating more empathy rather than accepting the order of nature as we were born into it. There was a time before hunting and slaughtering, and I think there will be a time after it, and I think we will be better of once we have moved past it. But I also have to consider that I might be wrong.

Doesn't the same apply to plants?! I don't know about you, but I'm quite attached to my indoors plants... Obviously I won't eat them (I don't know any recipes involving orchids), but I'd be quite sad if they died.

Humans also have to learn to swim, not fear fire, and many other things that our instincts say we shouldn't do.

I find it gets easier, the older I get. Right now we're bottle-feeding a hydrocephalic calf named "Georgie". He can't stand up for more than 30 seconds or walk in a straight line (and therefore would have died if left with his mother), but he will produce a fair amount of veal. Probably not enough to make up for the $3500 we could have gotten selling him as a young bull!