Aye, I can understand where you're coming from on this. I wouldn't actually cry over it, but I still don't want to see animals dying or something. It just goes against my personality.
Well, to a point. One way or another Minecraft tends to require that you kill stuff for various reasons. Wanna be able to craft arrows? Better be ready to kill some chickens. Wanna make books or bookshelves? Gotta get leather from a cow. A lot of idiots like to say things like "Derp blerp, it's just a kiddie game", but for a "kiddie" game there sure is a whole lot of stabbing.
I tend to think of it in a way like, well... gotta do what I gotta do. Like, "Nothing personal, kid".
That all being said, I wont kill anything that doesn't present a reason for doing so. Dolphins, bats? Wont touch them. And so on. Also as far as I know, cows/chickens in the game cannot actually drown unless forcibly submerged (which is incredibly rare without the player purposefully doing it). They will always just float safely otherwise. Maybe keep that bit in mind?
Generally how I think in most games though. The more realistic an animal looks, the more it will bother me.
No Man's Sky is another example. There's LOTS of alien creatures roaming the planets you'll explore. Most of the time, you interact by scanning them for !!SCIENCE!! or feeding them for other reasons. But one type of mission that you can get involves killing a bunch of creatures. They'll often give a reason for it, like "It's an invasive species, its' wrecking the local environment" but still, it's like... do I really have to do that? Most of the creatures tend to look harmless and cute, and they make this awful sound and just look so sad when they die. Just.... argh. Don't like it one bit. HOSTILE creatures, on the other hand, are a different story. They're basically rampaging murderblobs that will attack anything, so it's not so hard to justify taking them out. I'll usually search them out to fill the quota instead of attacking the non-deadly ones.
I'm the same way in that I never enjoyed doing those sorts of things in video-games.
But pretty much everybody else I've ever met that played video-games wasn't that way and enjoyed doing every evil thing possible. I've always seen it as a way for them to express the things they want to express but are not allowed to in real life.
So if I'm right, these are people with violent tendencies and the restraint to keep it to a virtual world.
I have similar ideas about people's enjoyment of violent movies and television, but maybe I'm just overthinking all of this in order to explain why so many people enjoy something that I don't enjoy! Who knows!
Has this not happened before? Is it not typical behavior of them? Or is it an ongoing problem? Do the joys of playing with them outweigh the problem?
Yeah, it seems to be super common that people playing games will go out of their way to slaughter things. The rampages in GTA that get parent groups so worked up is only one of many examples. I've never really understood it.