Firstly, it doesn't even need to have anything to do with "ethics", it's just ridiculous to argue that "lions eat their prey alive, hence I find it fine to do so." Lions will lick their balls in the presence of, well, pretty much any other organism. Do you suggest that we do the same?

I'm not saying that people are "inherently more moral" than animals, or "far superior", I'm saying that they're inherently people while animals inherently aren't people. A lion will never compare its own behavior to the behavior of a toad or an elephant or a human in order to judge its propriety, but you do this sort of thing, and you doing so is inherently human. A lion doesn't argue that it's superior to its prey and hence it's OK to eat it alive, but you do make this argument (or a different argument, the point is you're arguing about this on the Internet) and this is inherently a human thing.

You being a human makes it possible for me to ask you, why would you want to eat an animal alive, why not kill it first? What's in it for you? It's obviously painful for the animal and the vast majority of humans derive a certain degree of displeasure from observing the suffering of living organisms that they don't have a particular reason to harm. Perhaps the desire for philosophical consistency is the inherently human trait causing you to argue in favor of eating animals alive ("since most of us would kill an animal to save a human's life, it must also be OK to cause animals suffering for a near-zero gain or even just to derive pleasure from it, otherwise it's a slippery slope at the end of which we grant animals voting rights")?