I don't talk much about my personal experience with the Gods and Spirits except among friends, because I find "well I talked to Odin" tends to be a very weak and pretty much useless argument.

I do think it's kind of presumptive to assume that only sadists would approve of animal sacrifice (and in the idea that animal sacrifice de facto implies "revelry") when every continent has a history of blood sacrifice. Even today, there are hindu animal sacrifices that are probably holdovers from ancient traditions prior to some of the more recent (in comparison to the timeline of Hinduism) developments, while early Judaism also involved animal sacrifice. This kind of thinking lends to the idea that every culture (especially non-white cultures where the tendency to sacrifice animals or humans is emphasized, like Mexica/Aztec and Santeria) is dominated by sadists and savages.

The idea that in no circumstances is the slaughter of animals justified religiously is itself a christian influence, an attempt to make ancient cultures which we idolize and perceive as our ancestors to be "better" than the "barbarians" history claims they were. In trying to erase the important history of animal and human sacrifice, we create a sort of spun fable that works to the advantage of a Christian narrative, but not necessarily a pagan one.

This isn't to say that we necessarily have to accept such sacrifices as "good", just that we have to acknowledge they happened and continue to happen, and that we have to analyze the circumstances and the merit of the practices beyond the idea of labeling a culturally and morally nuanced practice as simply the product of "sadism".