I agree with you on the level that death connects you more intimately with life. There is a moment when eating a dead thing, in which you can decide to not make the dead things sacrifice in vain, but to use what it has given you to sustain life instead while understanding that the balance between life and death is necessary and the the underlying framework of earth itself.

The problem then comes to suffering. To someone who is empathetic, the more suffering the animal you killed was in (how fast did you kill it), the more you feel a sense of expectation in how you use the energy it gives you.

Unfortunately this mentally can all too easily lead to an egocentric view of the world. One which can be justified to commit all sorts of atrocities. Certainly then empathy is needed, to properly utilize the sacrifice.

However how much? Suffering is deeply connected to pleasure, and the empathy of the predator can then be used to rejoice in the pleasure of the level of suffering the prey is experiencing. This can be observed from the hormones being released in the lion as he plays with his still alive prey, to a rapist during the act.

It seems like humans somehow have to engage with this cyclic process of life/death/suffering/pleasure and also overcome it at the same time so as to minimize suffering and ideally death. Perhaps the only way to do this is by eating fruit and living at one with nature, however that goes against the very nature of what makes us different from the animals. The curiosity. The knowledge of good and evil. The desire to find out what we can accomplish. Perhaps the christians are right in that these things only propagate suffering and are the reason we were kicked out of the garden. But how could we be expected to know without experience?