"Preferences on Satisfaction" doesn't sound like "Valuing" to this Highly-conscious Human

If I understand Rolston’s argument correctly, I would disagree that there are human-independent values in nature. When he argues – or as Hettinger summarizes him as saying – that there are non-conscious valuers that exist (such as a tree valuing water even though it can’t consciously register this valuing) I think that a mistake has been made using the term value. Here it seems that he’s suggesting that the tree “values” the water or that a wolf “values” a deer in that the water and the deer are good for the animal, they are instrumental goods which contribute to some desire-satisfaction model of well-being for the tree or the wolf. It seems to me though that the wolf and the tree don’t really value the water and the deer – at least not in the sense that you could say a human being values a symphony or a kind gesture from a friend – but that they have an instinct which compels them to fulfill a desire or, in the trees case, some impulse to use a resource which is available and can contribute to the tree’s health. The distinction, I suppose, is that the act of valuing something is a conscious phenomena – something so inherently linked with a highly-functioning, conscious being that it seems unlikely to me that a majority of creatures on the Earth really have this special capacity. This, of course, is one kind of support for the subjectivist view that without conscious valuers no value can really exist. This isn’t to say that I think nature has no value, but that any value is does have has to be anthropogenic – value ascribed to nature (and I think that nature does have value, it just simply does not stem from nature) has humanity as the valuing subject. There is, of course, the possibility that an animal out there is both highly conscious and highly instinctual (maybe certain primates, etc.) and so I can’t simply base whether or not an animal can value something on whether it has instincts or not, but it still seems unlikely to me that any species other than humans has the intellectual capability to value something (in my sense of the word). There are probably huge holes in what I’ve argued that I can’t see, so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow for someone to persuade me that the subjectivist view is wrong.