"I, timothy garton, being of sound mind but dead body, do hereby bequeath my mortal remains to feed the Grizzly Bears of North America. Respect my body. Do no embalm! (A little mustard would be appreciated.) Please put me in a deep freezer if I must be held for a few days. Should my family refuse to claim me, or should I be indignant at the time of my demise, please explain to the County that I can be mailed to a wilderness (as evidenced by the presence of grizzlies and/or wolves. Please remove my eyes, kidneys and heart for the living, but retain my liver because I think Griz would like that most" (Peacock 123-24).
Although this statement seems somewhat unconventional and sardonic, I believe that it gets to the bosom of Hatley's argument. Human beings are an amalgam of flesh and green: "Before one can be oneself, whether that self be human or bear, one's body is already inextricably interwoven with all other bodies" (22). In that sense, we are no different than the Grizzly Bears that are the major protagonists in this narrative. In fact (to the dismay of many I am sure), it is likely that the deaths of many human beings have served to fertilize land and soil that has then provided a place for seed to grow yielding plants that we have eaten. Our appropriation of nature has produced in us a distorted perspective of how flesh is recycled into other organisms. Human beings have created a false reality where every living organism is available for ingestion with the exception of ourselves (15). This skew in our understanding does not atomically make us any more or less edible to predatory animals; however, most consider it inhumane, when a bear eats a human being. The Kantian explanation for the immoral act on behalf of the bear is that now the human being has become a means to an end, rather than an end. Of course, in his "critique of judgment," Kant recognizes many animals as ends in themselves. Importantly, Hatley points out that this is predominantly a construct of western thought: "To conclude that eating another being necessarily involves its reduction to a mere means ignores the testimony of many non-Western cultures that one's relationship to food should be structured primarily as sharing with it, in the very act of eating and being nourished by it, a communal participation in lie that crosses over the boundary between the human and the non-human" (18). Becoming part of one of the most powerful mammals on Earth sounds a hell of a lot better than being burned to ash or rotting away in a casket (cremation, by the way, apparently takes hours and consumes a ton of energy).
But are we not intrinsically valuable and non-humans merely extrinsically valuable? Well, Hatley answers this question by referring to another ethicist called Holmes Ralston who contends that viewing organisms as being either intrinsically or extrinsically valuable is paradoxical. In one sense, all living things are natural ends; therefore, they are intrinsically valuable. At the same time, as members of the ecosystem, they help perpetuate the stability and biodiversity of the whole; thus, they are also extrinsically valuable.
I think Hatley's most important point is that "humans are called in a way that the bear is not to limit our notion of the edible" (23). With our rationality, we have the opportunity, in most cases, to decide what we eat and how we come about that food. Human beings are the only species with a sense of morality--a conscience--but we are also the only species that needs that. The bear cannot be inhumane in the same way that humans can be: "Bears are inhumane in a manner that is beyond the humanly inhumane. For this reason, it can be claimed that their claim upon us as their food is uncanny. Or more than human" (24).
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