Fox hunting, where the fox is chased around by dogs for a long time before it is finally killed, is torture. Hunting with a rifle, where you sneak up on an animal and kill it before it even knows it's being hunted, is not. I'd say bow hunting is a grey area; if you have to track the bleeding animal down while it is slowly bleeding out, that's cruel. But if you're hunting for survival and a bow is all you have, or if you're training for that situation (and it's realistic that you might be in that situation) then it's ok.
If you compare the worst case scenario for hunting (fox hunting) with the best case scenario for slaughter, but often the slaughter isn't fun either. Many animals are very distressed on their way to the slaughter. Even more importantly, the lives they had before that point were probably much worse than the lives of the wild foxes. Farming animals for meat also happens on a scale that is absolutely incomparable to fox hunting. More animals are slaughtered every day than the number of foxes that were hunted in the entire history of humankind.
Secondly, you say that hunting is permissible if you're hunting for survival. Why doesn't the same apply for slaughter? You don't need to eat farmed animals for survival.
I'm reading the parent post not as "you say that hunting is permissible if you're hunting for survival" but instead as a claim that this cruelty is justified if and only if you're hunting for survival.
The same would apply for slaughter - if it would be a survival matter, then any methods would be permissible (i.e. some of the more cruel traditional approaches) but since it is not, it should be mandatory to use only the less painful approaches to slaughter.
I'm comparing "hunting for sport" against "hunting for food", and I'm comparing "hunting for food in a cruel way for the challenge" against "hunting for food in a cruel way out of necessity."
I don't think it's ok to torture a fox because it had a nice life before the torture started.
I don't think it's ok to torture a fox because we kill a lot more cows than foxes.
I don't think it's ok to torture animals that we raise for slaughter. I pay more for organic grass-fed cattle, free-range chicken and eggs, etc, in the hopes that the animals that provide my food were treated well while they were alive.
As I said at the start, I'm not a vegetarian. I'm definitely a part of the animal food chain, so I'm ok with the killing of animals further down the chain for me to eat, and I avoid the animals further up the chain so that I don't get eaten. (I wouldn't blame them if they got me, though.) What I object to is killing in a way that causes more suffering than it has to.
If you object to inflicting more suffering than you have to, how do you justify not being a vegetarian? In the end this is a trade of a bit of pleasure for you and quite a bit of suffering for the animal. Fox hunting, it seems to me, is precisely the same sort of trade. You could argue that the pleasure you get from eating meat is worth the suffering, but the pleasure the hunters get from fox hunting is not worth the suffering, but it is not clear to me how you would justify such a claim. Firstly, it seems to me not impossible that a hunter derives more pleasure from a hunting trip than from eating a piece of chicken. Secondly, it seems to me not impossible that the total amount of suffering inflicted on a chicken during its farm lifetime including slaughter is greater than the total amount of suffering inflicted on a fox during the hunt, particularly since free range isn't all it's made out to be. Thirdly, even if it were the case that fox hunting is a worse trade than meat eating, it's still unclear why it couldn't be the case that both are still worth it, or neither is worth it.
