The Beef Lizard Conundrum
Solve this one, genius.
Recently, I was hypothetically shipwrecked on a desert island. While it came with a stream of fresh water and a cave for shelter, food was scarce. Fish and turtles stayed away. Even seagulls were uninterested.
My guts growled. My stomach gnawed my insides. I was ready to drink my own blood like some sort of ancient mariner in a rhyme, when I laid eyes upon my salvation.
The beef lizard.
Highly unusual, the beef lizard lives only on my hypothetical island. It’s a rotund creature, scaly, but with good eating in the midsection and legs. They were easy to catch, too, and soon I feasted upon the unlucky creature.
The next day, I ate another. The day after that, another. In time, I was able to cobble together a raft from their bones and stitch a sail from their leathery skin.
However, the beef lizards did not survive. By the time my raft was complete, they were extinct. I lived, thanks to their sacrifice, and was found in a shipping channel a few days later, having eaten the last of my salted beef lizard.
Later, I drew this picture from memory.
Did I do the right thing, making the beef lizard extinct to survive? What would you do, if you were hypothetically shipwrecked in the same manner? There’s no saving the beef lizard. It’s you or them.
This maybe easier to answer as my belly is full. I think it wrong to destroy a species to save one human.