The term "brutality" keeps coming up in this, but I don't see how any of this is really brutal unless your a dedicated vegetarian. Kids have also been growing up on farms pretty much forever, and still do. I suppose if your a sheltered "coast liberal" in the cities of suburbs this might seem surprising or shocking, but even then it's pushing it.
To put things into perspective, food does not magically appear in stores. All of it is produced by people, usually towards the middle of the country in the areas scornfully referred to "flyover states". The people who do this have kids too, and despite the changing nature of farming, a lot of the kids still do get involved and/or have an awareness of what their parents do and what happens on a farm.
As far as clubbing newts and such goes, depending on where you are, relatively little kids might very much routinely run around with .22 rifles and shoot varmits of various sorts. In some places kids even run around, shoot squirrels, fill up bags, and then cook the things with their friends.
That said, I'll also say that while I'm not a massive conspiricy theorist, I sometimes wonder about the commonly held beliefs about primitive man. Largely because I look at how long things like cheese have been around, if you look at how you make cheese you'll notice that it requires a specific enzyme to be used which occurs in a calf's stomach. I can't see a bunch of people randomly experimenting with mixing slaughtered cow parts with milk for yucks, especially seeing as the entire process isn't something likely to be discovered by chance anyway.
There are a lot of little things like this that lead me to believe that someone must have taught early man some things. So while I'm not jumping to massive conclusions about aliens and such, I do think there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle missing. I consider questions like where the knowlege to make cheese came from (there are theories, but most of them wind up being in adequete for one reason or another) to be more compelling 'evidence' of us missing key elements of humanity's early days and origins than pictures of what might be ancient space ships, or someone rambling on about god (since I don't believe anyone ever claimed Angels taught humans how to make cheese or whatever).
At well, enough rambling.
The bottom line is that I don't consider the elements of Viva Pinata mentioned above to be dark at all. If anything I think it points out that some children are waaaay too sheltered especially compared to many times in history where almost everyone was a farmer.
