Sagoff's argument for why Animal Activists can't be Environmentalists and vice-versa:

• According to animal activists, animals have rights (Reagan) or interests in not suffering equal to ours (Singer)
• Nature treats animals worse than does humanity: "Mother nature makes Frank Perdue [the chicken magnate] look like a saint."
• Nature undermines the rights of animals by killing them in far greater numbers than do humans; nature "ruthlessly(?) limits animal populations by killing virtually every individual before maturity."
  • Few organisms survive to reach sexual maturity; most are quickly annihilated in the struggle for existence. "All species reproduce in excess, way past the carrying capacity of their niche. In her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits; a trout, 20,000 fry a tuna or cod, a million fry or ore; an elm tree, several million seeds; and an oyster, perhaps a hundred million spat. If one assumes that the population of each of these species is, from generation to generation, roughly equal, then on average only one offspring will survive to replace each parent. all the other thousands and millions will die, one way or another."
• Nature visits animals with suffering that exceeds animal suffering at the hands of humans: predation, starvation, disease, cold, parasitism, etc.
  • “Once as a college youth I killed an opossum that seemed sluggish and then did an autopsy. He was infested with a hundred worms! Grisly and pitiful, he seemed a sign of the whole wilderness, . . . too alien to value.” (Holmes Rolston, III)
  • The wilderness teems with its kinds but is a vast graveyard with a hundred species laid waste for one or two that survive . . . Wildness is a gigantic food pyramid, and this sets value in a grim, deathbound jungle. All is a slaughterhouse, with life a miasma rising over the stench. Nothing of the compassion or morality that we value in culture is found there (Rolston, 1986, p. 129).
• Animals--if they could choose--would prefer life in the barnyard (free food, shelter, and security) to life in the wild.
• Sagoff could get by with a much weaker premise than this one by pointing out simply that nature treats animals badly and that we could mitigate that treatment (and should--Sagoff argues--if we are animal activists)
• Thus to protect their rights and interests in not suffering, animal activists should be committed to getting animals out of the wild.
• For example, animal activists should provide animals with contraceptive care, heat animals' dens and put out food to keep them from freezing and starving in the winter.
• Animal activists should lobby to replace wilderness areas and national parks with more managed and humane environments (farms and ranches).
• Animal activists should try to prevent predation:
• One animal activist philosopher explicitly realizes this: Steve Sapontzis (editor of Between the Species) says: "We are morally obligated to prevent predation whenever we can do so without occasioning as much or more unjustified suffering than the predation would create." Morals, Reason, and Animals (1987)
• But such a proposal is an anti-environmentalist conclusion
• It sacrifices the authenticity, integrity, and wildness of whole ecosystems (the concern of environmentalists) to protect individual animals (the concern of animal activists).
• Therefore, animal activists can't consistently be environmentalists and vice-versa.
• Additionally, since the policy recommendations that follow from animal activists' theories (about the moral status of animals) are outrageously silly and absurd, these theories of animal rights (Regan) and animal equality (Singer) are false.
  • Sagoff does not say the above, but it is suggested by his article.

For a journal article on "Policing Nature" click here.

Questions: