I saw a nature show about grizzly bears fishing in an Alaskan river. They wake up after their hibernation and need to rebuild weight and lost body fat. When the salmon arrive to breed in the rivers, they become a vital nutritional resource for the bears.
In the film, I saw that these grizzly bears were eating the salmon eggs and leaving most of the rest of the fish carcass uneaten and this struck me as wasteful. They also eat the heads, skin, and subcutaneous tissue to obtain the most fat. But these bears I saw seemed to be choosing the females and focusing on eating the eggs.
It turns out that the eggs have more fat and more protein than the flesh of the fish, and when the fish are plentiful, they choose to go after these egg-bearing females. Nature has programmed these bears to maximize their protein and fat intake and not waste their energy on the less nutritious parts of the fish.
This wastefulness shows that the bears were not concerned about the wellbeing of the salmon species. If they were, they would have eaten the whole fish, resulting in fewer fish killed overall, which would have minimized their impact on the salmon species. You could say that these bears had a callous bear-centric attitude towards the salmon.
What's my point?
It is to ask some elementary questions concerning nature, our species, and environmental ethics. Did not evolution also make humans a creature that tries to maximize energy intake in the most efficient way? Are not all creatures self-centered when it comes to meeting their survival needs? If not, how could they hope to survive?
Anthropocentrism, in its original connotation in environmental ethics, is the belief that value is human-centered and that all other beings are means to human ends. Environmentally -concerned authors have argued that anthropocentrism is ethically wrong and at the root of ecological crises. But how can species-centrism be the law of nature for all others but not for humans?
