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I think I'm just going to have to admit that I am being selfish when I eat meat and accept that it is wrong.

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I think I am in the same boat as you.

I would likely not eat meat if I had to kill the animals myself. Yet I love a good cheeseburger and can't see myself giving them up. I suck.

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This sentiment always feels odd to me precisely because I spent the period of my life from ages 8ish-16 on a farm. Some true stories:

-We owned cattle. On a few occasions a cow would die giving birth (or from injuries related to giving birth). In every case we, and by "we" I mean every member of my family participated including my younger sisters, bottle-fed the calf until it was old enough to butcher. They had names and we could simply walk up and pet them, and then we ate them and didn't care.

-We always had at least one family dog that lived indoors with us. They were members of the family, they slept in our beds more often than not, and my sisters would cry for days when they died. Once we saw a segment on a news show about how in China or somewhere dogs were being raised for fur coats, and how animal activists were crying that they could be using coyote fur or something instead of "betraying" these pets. We were all rolling our eyes and agreeing that if the dogs were raised explicitly for fur, activist groups should just kindly shut up. This despite the fact that dogs are pets, and coyotes are common pests that sometimes attack livestock and pets, and almost always made a lot of noise during the night.

-We also had outdoor cats. Outdoor cats that would never live more than 5ish years because of forest predators. We tried to prevent this; on several occasions my father would throw open a door and start shooting from inside the house while the rest of us watched TV. Yet, if one of the cats caught a mouse, we wouldn't try to stop it from eating it.

-Rattlesnakes decide to nest near children's playing area, so my father protects his children by killing the rattlesnakes. Children play near wasps nest, wasp stings children to protect its young, father kills the wasps.

My point in all of this is that anyone who is actually exposed to these animals is going to become desensitized pretty quickly to the idea of animals dying, simply because there's no way to care about it without being maddenly inconsistent or making living almost impossible. That doesn't mean that we approve of things like cruelty to animals, only that I won't argue with what you eat even if it's your own poodle.

(BTW, I don't buy the argument something is automatically moral because animals do it. Male cats will kill the kittens of a female they haven't mated with; that's genocide in my book)

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The male cat kills the kittens because the kittens drink milk from the female, during this time the female cannot go into heat. So evolution dictates the kittens must die.