I typically bag a few pheasants a year, as well as fish. When I lived in Wyoming I would get a deer occasionally, and have also hunted elk. I typically like to take female deer/elk, because I don't really care about the sport of it, I just want the food. Organic as it comes, and there is really no comparison imo. Just like the difference between buying beef from a local farm versus the stuff you would get at the grocery store. If you treat it as just senseless killing then you are not really hunting. In my mind hunting can be part sport, but I look at it like harvesting something from nature. Respect it, take care of it, and it will keep giving.
Plus when actually trying to kill the animal, you try to do it as clean and efficiently as possible. Heart lung shots, and be ready to fire another round if you don't do it cleanly the first time.
To be entirely honest though, each time I have looked down my scope to pull the trigger my heart pounds and I can/have had moments of hesitation. I think it's because killing doesn't comes natural to us, at least not in the society that we have been raised in. I still enjoy the food though, plus the money that we pay to hunt helps to preserve nature and ensure that the animal population is healthly for the next generation.