Agree about that. I’ve seen videos of pelicans eating pigeons. It’s only concerned with getting it down, not the status of the bird. Not nice, but those are our (human) values. Most of the time.
Tangent… rather than feeding seeds/grains to song birds, I put out live mealworms. From the standpoint of the birds, Ask a Ornithologist assured me it is fine to feed birds live mealworms (not likely to lead to dependence or overeating). I guess I had not really considered from the standpoint of the mealworms. 
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Studying pain is quite tricky/difficult. But as far as I understand, it’s likely that the pain response in insects is much less specific than in other organisms. They have some generalized stress hormones and can respond to aversive stimuli, but generally don’t have the more specific pain-oriented neural sensors and central processing to experience pain in the same way as a vertebrate might.
So I wouldn’t worry too much about this!
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This is true, most animals do not care about the wellbeing of their prey either for the positive (sadism) or negative (i.e., killing cleanly), albeit with one or two major exceptions. Chimpanzees have actually been observed to have a sense of sadism, keepers of chimpanzees that have been taught sign language have observed that the chimpanzees understand that physical harm to others causes those individuals pain (the same sign the chimps use to convey harm to others is the same one they use to communicate that they are in pain to their keepers), and at least some individuals actually seem to actively enjoy the suffering of other organisms. One of them even signed “hurt you” before attacking one of the keepers unprovoked. And then there’s the whole thing about dolphins sometimes tormenting other animals more because they seem to enjoy it rather than out of any Darwinian desire for food or mating opportunities. It’s probably a sophont thing.
The invasive fish you see me catch in my observations? I feed them to my pet fish at home. They’re usually swallowed whole.
Since I only catch small fish, this is feasible. Mosquitofish, guppies, African sharptooth catfish, Nile tilapia, Mayan cichlids; Any of them goes to my pet predatory fish.
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