These days, from what little I've observed, what you speak of is basically absent. I don't know exactly what you'd call the opposite of misanthropy, but whatever you'd call it, it seems more common than misanthropy, and misanthropy is generally disliked. While understandable, I do not regard this as completely positive; I only regard misanthropy as truly negative when combined with arrogance or active malice. I am of the opinion that rejecting both misanthropy and its opposite is the correct path, but that is just me.
Regardless, I think your analysis of this contradiction misses the point, because the people you are talking about simply do not agree with your premise of "to be a conscious being is to be evil." Even if you are right--and I don't think you are, because I (and, I think most others, including the people you're talking about) don't accept Hegel's definition of evil--what determines if there's a contradiction in their thought isn't what's true, but what they think. If you accept a different premise to what evil is, there isn't necessarily a paradox.
And I think they do have a different premise of what evil is. They look at things like environmental destruction, homophobia, slavery, racism, and the like and consider those evil. And then they look at the species of animal they think of when they think "animal" and note that--at least as far as they know--those things aren't present in those species. For the most part they've even right. Invasive species (and some native ones) can be environmentally destructive, but humans really are the most environmentally destructive species and most species aren't particularly environmentally destructive. I am not aware of any homophobia in any species other than humans, and as far as we know humans are the only ones with a concept of "race."
There are species that have slavery, but as far as I know that's limited to ants. Most of these people aren't thinking about ants, and I think that exposes the true flaw in their thinking--it's not contradictory, it's not a paradox, it's just narrow-mindedness.
There are plenty of evils that, as a whole, are pretty epidemic to the human species and are fairly isolated to the human species.
There are also plenty of things that these people would (crucially) admit are evils, and are way more common among various other species than humans. Killing a mother's children so that you can mate with her, for instance; that's pretty evil. Eating prey alive--well, that's not that unheard of in human society, but it's way more common outside it. I can't state for sure how common surplus killing is inside and outside human society, but it's certainly something many species (albeit including humans) do.
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