Nonhuman Animal Property: Reconciling Environmentalism and Animal Rights

John Hadley

1. Property and Environmental Ethics

The concept of property has been the focus of recent debate in environmental ethics. Proponents of private property rights argue that private owners are likely to preserve natural areas and endangered species because they alone have to bear the costs associated with environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.1 Others argue that property rights in natural resources are limited by obligations to do justice to the interests nonowners have in “common goods.”2 In what follows I will broaden the debate about property in environmental ethics by suggesting a very different way that private ownership could help protect natural areas and the nonhuman animals that inhabit them. As a check on human intervention in natural areas that is destructive of habitat, a nonhuman animal property rights regime (structured along the lines I suggest) can secure the maintenance of ecosystem stability and ensure the vital interests of nonhuman animals are respected. The key moral demands of environmentalism and animal rights can be met by extending the scope of property ownership beyond the human species to other sentient animals that have a vital interest in using natural goods.

2. Environmentalism and Animal Rights Liberalism

We can expect environmentalists and liberals to be openminded about nonhuman animal property rights. Given that environmentalists believe that rocks, plants, rivers, insects and ecosystems can have moral value, it is reasonable to assume that they consider the interests of freeroaming nonhuman animals as prima facie worthy of respect. The trend in animal rights is to consider severely cognitively impaired human beings and nonhuman animals of comparable capacities as, intrinsically, equally morally signiﬁcant.3 Roughly speaking, holding that severely cognitively impaired human beings and nonhuman animals of comparable capacities are “like cases” entails that, if liberals judge that severely cognitively impaired human beings are entitled to own property, then there is no logical obstacle to property being a legitimate entitlement of nonhuman animals of comparable capacities.

3. Is There a Logical Obstacle to Nonhuman Animal Property Rights?

It may be objected, however, that there is a fundamental logical obstacle to nonhuman animals owning property, namely, they lack the requisite mental capacities to exercise property rights.4 An objection along these lines presupposes that ownership for nonhuman animals must be a mirror image of the ownership enjoyed by moral agents. But, the institution of nonhuman animal property can conform to the standard rights and incidents of full liberal ownership without having to be a carbon copy of the human animal property institution.5 Mental incompetence is plainly no obstacle to human beings with comparable capacities to some nonhuman animals owning property. Therefore, just as the property interests of human individuals deemed mentally incompetent can be overseen on their behalf by responsible guardians, so can the property rights of nonhuman animals.6 In the nonhuman property regime the responsible guardian could be a represen- tative of the animal protection movement or a government ofﬁcer charged with the management of nonhuman animal estates. When we consider that the para- digm case of nonhuman animal property ownership is enjoyment of a secure territory free from deleterious human impact, it is likely that nonhuman animal property rights will, in practice, amount to human beings being excluded, or having usufructuary rights carefully regulated to respect the interests of the nonhuman animals concerned.

4. Why Property Rights?

The nonhuman animal property regime is an adjunct to the prevailing instru- mental view of the value of nature. Indeed, the view that nature is valuable because it provides human and nonhuman animals alike with the goods they need is bolstered by the property framework. Given that environmentally destructive activities are invariably cases of individuals or corporations exercising their entitlements in accordance with some type of property rights regime, people who destroy natural areas are likely to accept the legitimacy of property rights. The moral and political legitimacy of a check on destructive actions will thus rest on the invocation of concepts and principles that are already recognized as authori- tatively established. Property rights are entrenched in liberal democracies and are defended by appeal to established moral notions such as desert, liberty, and utility.7 Although there is opposition in liberal democracies to the institution of private property, the nonhuman animal property regime should be judged on its merits as an instrument for meeting the moral demands of environmentalists and liberals. Attributing property rights to nonhuman animals would secure for natural areas, and the animals which inhabit them, a level of legal and political protection, not to mention normative significance, which surpasses that currently afforded to them. For liberals specifically, the extension of property rights to nonhuman animals is desirable in two respects. Firstly, it is overdue recognition of the significance of the environment as the background against which nonhuman animals Nonhuman Animal Property: Reconciling Environmentalism and Animal Rights 307 stand as free and autonomous individuals rather than as “Darwinian automatons” exercising instinctual behavior.8 Secondly, the property regime bolsters the liberal view by providing the conceptual wherewithal for the claim that human activity that is destructive of habitat is a necessary harm to nonhuman animals. Assum- ing that any animals relocated did not suffer during the process of relocation, and assuming also that they were removed to a qualitatively similar habitat, then the destruction of habitat does not necessarily result in suffering to sentient beings.9 However, if the animals concerned had a property right in the habitat concerned then every instance of destruction would constitute harm to the individuals involved. The harm would take the form of an infringement of a property right.

5. The Mechanics of Nonhuman Animal Property Rights

Three important considerations guide the practical application of the nonhuman animal property regime. Firstly, territorial determinations must trace the interests of the sentient beings concerned. This is important because it will ensure that the maximum amount of moral significance can be attributed to the applicable interest. This can only happen if the interests concerned are held by individuals with comparable capacities to human beings who are deemed maximally morally significant. Sentient nonhuman animals alone meet this criterion as they have comparable capacities to severely cognitively impaired human beings, who are held to be maximally morally significant.10 Secondly, boundaries marking territory must be able to be utilized by the relevant legal and bureaucratic institutions which regulate existing land use regimes. Given that nonhuman animal property rights are proposed as a means of checking human intervention in natural areas that is destructive of habitat, it is imperative that territorial boundaries are transparent, if only so they can be effectively policed. Thirdly, there must be iden- tifiable individuals who can exercise the specific powers associated with the rights concerned when the circumstances arise. Inevitably, particularly in areas with significant human settlement, conflicts will occur in which the nonhuman property interest is pitted against a human one. It is in such cases that the powers associated with the rights will need to be exercised by a responsible guardian.

The Role of Ecologists

Ecologists and other natural scientists provide scientiﬁcally rigorous accounts of how combinations of natural variables interact in processes that engender stability in ecosystems.11 Among the dynamic variables recognized as playing a critical role in the maintenance of ecosystem stability is the utilization of natural goods by nonhuman animals.12 After many decades of research ecologists have concluded that the utilization activities of nonhuman animals are generally not undertaken on a haphazard basis but instead more or less conform to discernible patterns. Remmert, for example, alludes to the systematic nature of nonhuman animal territorial demarcation; he says: 308 John Hadley

Mammals and birds move about within an area they inhabit in a way that is by no means irregular; they follow established routes, and the boundaries are often just as exactly ﬁxed. This arrangement provides for optimal utilization of resources and compensates for the increased vulnerability of uniformly distributed animals to predators.13

The disciplines which attest to nonhuman animals using natural goods in structured ways are regularly called upon by governments and interested parties to determine the boundaries of natural areas. Information provided by natural scientists is used to delineate the boundaries of a wide variety of natural areas such as ecosystems, logging coupes, sensitive habitat buffer zones, suitable habitat for endangered species restoration programs, national parks and wilderness determinations. In cases when natural scientists cannot provide adequate detail, or when the details they do provide are contested, a panel is established to consider the evidence and make informed assessments based upon scientific consensus.14 The information natural scientists provide is seen as reliable enough to have a bearing on statutory processes which regulate housing and industry development. Indeed, the prevalence of environmental impact assessments indicates that the input of natural scientists is increasingly seen as critical for planning processes concerned with any sort of development which has a bearing on natural areas. Moreover, the information natural scientists present will often shape the ownership rights of human beings in a myriad of ways such as by qualifying title from exclusive possession to limited title; from ownership rights to usufructuary rights; or by capping resource use through quota systems. The point to stress is that the detail from which to shape the content of nonhuman animal property rights can be derived from the same scientific sources deemed credible enough to shape human property incidents. The fact that nonhuman animals tend to demarcate their territory in ways that can be mapped out, and that such information is already employed in planning processes, indicates that the property incidents of nonhuman animals can be specified in ways that will mesh with existing economic, political, and legal institutions which have a bearing on the practical dimensions of ownership. To discredit the suit- ability of such information for determinations of land boundaries is to discredit a large swathe of criteria upon which many land use regimes are based and regulated.

6. Justiﬁcation of Nonhuman Animal Property Rights

The utilization of natural resources by human beings in order to satisfy their vital interests is ordinarily considered a sufficient justification for human animals having property rights over natural resources.15 Nonhuman animals also use natural resources for critical purposes such as fulfilling their most basic needs and those of their offspring. Nonhuman animals drink from rivers, streams, lakes and other kinds of watercourses to satisfy their thirst. They forage, glean, graze and hunt to satisfy their hunger. They build nests and burrows, and occupy ledges Nonhuman Animal Property: Reconciling Environmentalism and Animal Rights 309 and dens, in order to breed and obtain shelter from the elements. Grounding the nonhuman animal property right on the interest in satisfying basic needs leaves little scope for objections that appeal to epistemic difficulties associated with nonhuman animal cognition. We know enough about the mental lives of nonhuman animals, and how the frustration of their basic needs impacts upon their welfare, to assuredly claim that their interest in using natural resources is vital.16 It is also a necessary condition of property ownership that owners obtain a demonstrable benefit from excluding others from using the resources concerned.17 It is reasonable to assume that nonhuman animals would benefit from the exclu- sion of human beings from their habitat because low human activity in natural areas generally results in favorable environmental outcomes, such as a reduction in deforestation and an increase in biodiversity.18 As a check on deleterious human intervention, a property right would ensure security of access to the goods nonhuman animals require to meet their needs and those of their offspring. The extension of property rights to nonhuman animals will not undermine what some believe to be the primary virtue of the institution of private property, the principle of internalizing externalities.19 The principle states, roughly, that an asset is most efficiently managed when any costs associated with its maintenance are borne solely by those responsible for using it. The intuitive idea is that individuals are more likely to use natural resources wisely if they know that they are liable for any remediation expenses arising from misuse. It is a platitude of ecology, however, that nonhuman animals are environmentally sustainable users of natural resources, at least when they are left to their own devices. In natural areas where biodiversity is low or decreasing, it is likely that externalities are the result of actions by human beings such as toxic waste pollution, soil salinity, deforestation, overgrazing, housing or tourism development. In the unlikely event that externalities do occur on nonhuman animal property they can be addressed by the guardian who will invariably have a serious interest, if not expertise, in ecologically sustainable land management.

7. Objections to the Nonhuman Animal Property Framework

Normativity of Resource Utilization

It might be objected that a crucial element which distinguishes between how human and nonhuman animals use natural goods has not been acknowledged. This element is the degree to which the process of resource utilization undertaken by human animals is a product of individual initiative or autonomy. Let us call this type of autonomy “desert-deserving autonomy.” We can understand desert- deserving autonomy as consisting in the sort of preference autonomy enjoyed by all animals (human and nonhumans) but with an additional element, namely, the individual initiative that nonhuman animals arguably lack.20 It is desert- deserving autonomy, according to the objection, that underpins attributions of entitlement to human beings who utilize natural goods. 310 John Hadley

I will make two responses to this objection: Firstly, the mental states that constitute desert-deserving autonomy occur in response to physiological, func- tional, or environmental “cues” such as feelings of hunger or thirst, and the pres- ence of food or water. It is these cues that are also likely to be prompting nonhuman animals into the behavioral responses that are labeled as merely prod- ucts of instinct. However, when we think about why it is that the satisfaction of basic needs is considered a vital interest, it is plainly not that such needs give one an opportunity to demonstrate individual initiative. What is important about basic needs is that the satisfaction or frustration of them matters to us. It matters objec- tively, insofar as satisfying basic needs entails that we are able to keep on living and functioning. As well, it matters subjectively, in the first-person sense of alter- ing how things feel on the inside. Both of these senses of mattering are also applicable to sentient nonhuman animals, who are the intended recipients of the property entitlements being put forward.21 A second way of addressing this objection is with reference to human beings with comparable capacities to the nonhuman animals in question. In spite of the fact that, like nonhuman animals, severely cognitively impaired human beings are not responsible for their actions, would we consider them undeserving of the goods they require to meet their vital interests? Any entitlement attributed to severely cognitively impaired human beings would have to be based, logically, upon their “non-desert-deserving” preference autonomy. If lacking desert- deserving autonomy is not a sufficient reason to deny severely cognitively impaired human beings the goods needed to satisfy their vital interests, then it cannot be a sufficient reason to deny such goods to nonhuman animals of comparable capacities.

Ecosystem Stability and Nonsentient Life

The basis of this objection is the claim that the institution of property is an artificial instrument designed to regulate human land use and as such is funda- mentally unsuitable as a basis for regulating natural systems. Ecological holists may argue the nonhuman animal property regime will have a negligible impact on securing the health of entire ecosystems, while individualist environmentalists might claim that an institution which secures the habitat of sentient nonhuman animals will likely fail to protect nonsentient individuals who exist outside the territorial boundary protected by the property right.22 However, it is just not true to imply that the nonhuman animal property regime is artificially imposed upon the natural order in the same way that human animal property rights arguably are, when the boundaries of the nonhuman rights are set by the natural behavior patterns of the sentient beings concerned. Holists need to remember that the territorial interests of many species of sentient beings extend over large areas and may even cross into different distinct ecosystems.23 Insofar as an attribution of a nonhuman property right entails that these possibly Nonhuman Animal Property: Reconciling Environmentalism and Animal Rights 311 large areas will be free of deleterious human impact, the scope for ecosystem protection is significant. A similar point can be made to individualist environmentalists. On the basis of the protection it secures for large swathes of land, the nonhuman animal property right will ensure that the flourishing conditions of all life within the territory demarcated will likely be enhanced. The question remains as to the efficacy of the nonhuman animal property regime in protecting areas in which there are no sentient beings. It is true that, as I have outlined it, the nonhuman animal property regime cannot offer direct protection to such areas. But, it can be argued that damaging these areas could result in a spillover effect which may deleteriously impact upon nonhuman animal property areas. Alternatively, in cases where the absence of sentient nonhuman animals is due to extinction, the property entitlement regime could be implemented after a reintroduction program. Another way the institution could be usefully invoked in the protection of areas in which sentient beings are nonexistent is by assessing the requirements of future generations of nonhuman animals in adjoining areas.24

Privately Held Land

It might also be objected that nonhuman animal property rights will inevitably clash with the property rights held by human beings. However, we should not place undue emphasis on the preference for exclusive possession that prevails in the case of the standard human property institution. It needs to be remembered that the precise nature of the interest that nonhuman animals have in natural goods is gauged from observations of their natural behavior. It is fair to suggest then that many of the nonhuman animal property incidents will be compatible with a range of human land-use practices, particularly activities undertaken by individuals or organizations that are influenced by principles of environmental sustainability. For their part, the fact that nonhuman animals tend to use natural goods in ways which ensure that “enough and as good is left for others” demonstrates how the extension of property rights to them is consistent with the spirit of the Lockean proviso.25 Accordingly, it would be consistent with the nonhuman animal property regime that human beings and nonhuman animals could have dual ownership of a given parcel of land, or that nonhuman animals are given usufructuary rights over land that is owned by human beings. Evidence from ecology supports the concept of dual ownership between human and nonhuman animals, given that the vital interests of animals coincide on the ground. Field studies indicate that more than one type of animal may have an interest in a particular area of land as the territorial demarcations within a given species, and between different species, will often overlap.26 The basic point, however, is that the institution of property is flexible enough to modify conceptions of ownership in order to do justice to competing moral demands. This flexibility is comple- mented by the nature of many of the activities undertaken by human beings that 312 John Hadley may conflict with the nonhuman interest in natural goods, particularly those activities that are influenced by principles of sustainability such as organic food pro- duction, national parks, and ecotourism. Alternatively, the scope of the nonhuman property regime could be restricted to exclude areas of significant human impact. This is not necessarily an unrea- sonable suggestion given that restricting the scope of the nonhuman property regime would seem to be consistent with a trend observable in practice. Evidence suggests that suitable habitat for nonhuman animals, and the conditions most con- ducive to strong territorial determinations, are likely to be found in areas of low human activity.27

Guardianship and Conﬂicting Rights

A further objection to the extension of property rights to nonhuman animals concerns the role of the mentally competent guardian.28 It is true that in many instances the guardian may be unaware of the individual on whose behalf he is acting. It is also fair to suggest that there could be conﬂict between guardians representing competing nonhuman interests given that animals from different species share overlapping territories. But, objections like these lose sight of the fact that the overarching goal of the nonhuman animal property framework is to keep an area free of deleterious human impact. Given that this is the primary objective, it is reasonable to allow for the mechanics of the framework to be nuanced in particular circumstances. To that end: The animal whose territory the guardian has a duty to protect need not be this or that particular animal. Instead, the bearer of the rights could be a “Jane Doe” individual, that is, any one of the individual animals present but not anyone in particular. Conceiving of the owner in this way has the advantage of sustaining the property rights in perpetuity in the event of the death of a designated animal. Alternatively, the guardian herself could be considered as the owner, in the same way that a trust occupies the role of the owner on behalf of a group of claimants. In cases when there are many different species residing in an area, a single guardian could represent all individuals or, alternatively, a committee comprising guardians for each species could make decisions on behalf of the all the animals.

8. Conclusion

While there is no definitive conception of ownership, and the precise nature of property entitlements varies according to the prevailing legal system, generally speaking, ownership entails a right to use, a right to exclude, and a right to transfer.29 All of these necessary conditions of ownership can be meaningfully satisfied in the nonhuman animal property rights regime envisaged above. That nonhuman animals use the natural goods inside their territorial boundaries is a truism of ecology and evolutionary biology. It is also a truism that nonhuman animals are, all things being equal, better off without deleterious interference by Nonhuman Animal Property: Reconciling Environmentalism and Animal Rights 313 human beings into their territorial areas. Finally, the right to transfer, insofar as it is applicable in the case of nonhuman animals, can be exercised on their behalf by mentally competent guardians. Having a vital interest in using natural resources is ordinarily considered a sufficient reason to attribute a property right in natural resources to human beings. It would be implausible, given what we know about their lives, to claim that sentient nonhuman animals do not have a vital interest in using natural resources, given that they use them in order to meet their most basic needs and those of their offspring. To conclude: It is increasingly being recognized that environmentalists and liberals require a distinctly practical and human mechanism which can address the moral demands of their respective views. As one leading environmentalist put it:

In speculating about the future of the animal rights/environmental ethics debate, it is important to recognize that ultimately the controversy will not be resolved by philosophers at the theoretical level, but by environmental professionals and concerned citizens at the practical level. The resolution of the controversy is not simply ﬁnding a winning argument, but of ﬁnding a position that all those concerned about the environment can understand, feel comfortable with, and apply in their professional work and their daily lives.30

The nonhuman animal property regime outlined above strikes a balance between the naturalism explicit in environmentalism and a naturalistic orientation implicit in animal rights liberalism. The framework allows for the limits and incidents of property rights to be set by ecological considerations but against the background of considered moral principles and concepts. As a check on human intervention in natural areas that is destructive of habitat, a nonhuman animal property regime can secure the maintenance of ecosystem stability and ensure the vital interests of nonhuman animals are respected.

Notes

1 See, e.g., David Schmidtz, “The Institution of Property,” in Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works, ed. David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2002), 361–72. 2 See, e.g., Kirstin Schrader-Frechette, Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democ- racy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), and John Hadley, “Excluding Destruction: Towards a Sustainable Libertarian Property Rights Regime,” Philosophy in the Contemporary World, 12, no. 2 (2005). 3 See Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Signiﬁcance of Human and Nonhuman Animals (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 113–23, and Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Prob- lems at the Margins of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 203–09. Also, R. G. Frey, “Animals,” in The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 161–87, and Simon Cushing, “Against ‘Humanism’: Speciesism, Personhood, and Preference,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 34 (2003): 556–71. 4 See, e.g., John Chipman Gray, The Nature and Sources of the Law, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 43, cited in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer 314 John Hadley

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976), 192, and H. J. McCloskey, “Rights,” Philosophical Quarterly, 15 (1965). 5 For a list of the standard rights and incidents of full liberal ownership see A. M. Honorè, “An Analy- sis of the Ownership of Property,” in Social and Political Philosophy: Contemporary Readings, ed. Baruch A. Brody and George Sher (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 693–702. 6 The guardianship model is proposed as a basis for legal standing for nonhuman animals by David S. Favre in “Equitable Self-Ownership for Animals,” Duke Law Journal 50 (2000): 473–502. Stone proposed a similar idea for protecting natural areas in “Should Trees Have Standing?” in Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works, ed. Schmidtz and Willott, 46–50. Joel Feinberg also advocates guardianship in “Can Animals Have Rights?” in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, ed. Regan and Singer, 193. T. M. Scanlon entertains a similar concept he calls “trusteeship” in What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), 182–84. 7 Lawrence C. Becker, Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1977), 101–18. 8 See Tom Regan’s discussion of the autonomy of animals in The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 82–84, and Pluhar’s discussion of the well-being of freeroaming nonhuman animals in Beyond Prejudice, 274–80. Ted Benton claims that the learn- ing of species-typical behavior by animals is to be understood as the acquisition of skills in Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice (London: Verso, 1993), 170. 9 Bryan G. Norton, “Environmental Ethics and Nonhuman Rights,” in The Animal Rights/Environ- mental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective, ed. Eugene C. Hargrove (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 80–83. 10 See McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 208. Which kinds of sentient nonhuman animals have comparable capacities and, by corollary, equal intrinsic moral status to severely cognitively impaired human beings is, ultimately, an empirical question. While it may be unclear in respect of verte- brates such as reptiles and birds, we can reasonably assume that most species of mammals will qualify for guardianship representation. 11 See R. J. Putman and S. D. Wratten, The Principles of Ecology (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 338–39. 12 See John Pastor, Robert J. Naiman, Bradley Dewey, and Pamela McInnes, “Moose, Microbes, and the Boreal Forest,” in Readings in Ecology, ed. Stanley I. Dodson and Kandis Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 193–204, and Putnam and Wratten, The Principles of Ecology, 44. 13 Hermann Remmert, Ecology (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1980), 122. 14 Potential gray wolf restoration areas were determined in this manner. See David J. Mladenoff and Theodore A. Sickley, “Assessing Potential Gray Wolf Restoration in the Northeastern United States,” in Readings in Ecology, ed. Stanley I. Dodson and Kandis Elliott, 112. 15 See, e.g., Becker, Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations, 101–02. 16 Donald M. Broom, “Needs of Animals,” in Encyclopaedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, ed. Marc Bekoff (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 255–56. 17 Anthony De Jasay, “Property and Its Enemies,” Philosophy, 79 (2004): 57–58. 18 See Peter M. Vitousek, Harold A. Mooney, Jane Lubchenco, and Jerry M. Melillo, “Human Dom- ination of Earth’s Ecosystems,” in Readings in Ecology, ed. Stanley I. Dodson and Kandis Elliott, 207–18. For a speciﬁc example, see William Cronon’s account of the increase in biodiversity at a former chemical weapons site following its closure in “Introduction: In Search for Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996), 27–28. 19 See, e.g., John Rawls, “The Law of Peoples,” in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 541, and Schmidtz, “The Institution of Property,” 371. 20 The attribution of a kind of limited preference autonomy to nonhuman animals is a basic assump- tion of animal rights. See Mark Rowlands, Animals like Us (London: Verso, 2002), 23, and Nonhuman Animal Property: Reconciling Environmentalism and Animal Rights 315

Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 84–86. Whether any species of nonhuman animals have what I am calling “desert-deserving autonomy” is a matter for debate. See David DeGrazia, “Auton- omy of Animals,” in Encyclopaedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, ed. Bekoff, 83–85. 21 Although there is considerable debate about the nature of nonhuman animal cognition, it is generally accepted that at least sentient mammals have sufﬁcient cognitive complexity to predicate of them an experiential welfare. See, e.g., Frey, “Animals,” 173–76, and Stephen Sapontsis, Morals, Reason and Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 74–76. 22 Ecological holists hold, roughly, that only distinct ecosystems have noninstrumental value and are ethically prior to individual sentient beings. For a survey of holistic approaches see Clare Palmer, “An Overview of Environmental Ethics,” in Environmental Ethics: An Anthology, ed. Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 23. Notable holists include Eric Katz; see “Is There a Place for Animals in the Moral Consideration of Nature?” in Envi- ronmental Ethics: An Anthology, ed. Light and Rolston, 86; Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in Environmental Ethics: An Anthology, ed. Light and Rolston, 38–46; J. Baird Callicott, “A Trian- gular Affair,” Environmental Ethics 2 (1980): 320. Individualist environmentalists hold that all individual living organisms have noninstrumental value. See, e.g., Albert Schweitzer, Ethics and Civilisation (London: A&C Black, 1929); Nicholas Agar, “Biocentrism and the Concept of Life,” Ethics 108 (October 1997): 147–68; Paul Taylor, Respect for Nature (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1986). 23 See Mladenoff and Sickley, “Assessing Potential Gray Wolf Restoration in the Northeastern United States,” and Ian J. Whyte, “Headaches and Heartaches: The Elephant Management Dilemma,” in Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works, ed. Schmidtz and Willott, 293–305. 24 For a discussion of the moral considerability of future generations of nonhuman animals see Gary Varner, “Can Animal Rights Activists Be Environmentalists?” in Environmental Ethics: An Anthology, ed. Light and Rolston, 110. 25 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 291.While the precise meaning of Locke’s injunction is contested, it is reasonable to conclude that he was concerned to acknowledge the moral claims nonowners have in the natural resources concerned. This suggests that ownership of natural resources may be subject to usufructuary constraints which must do justice to the interest others have in using such goods. By using resources sustainably nonhuman animals demonstrate they can meet this requirement of legitimate ownership. For a discussion of the Lockean proviso as a sustainable use requirement, see Hadley, “Excluding Destruction: Toward a Sustainable Libertarian Property Rights Regime.” 26 Remmert, Ecology, 121–26. 27 See Mladenoff and Sickley, “Assessing Gray Wolf Restoration,” 113. 28 I am indebted to Jeff McMahan for suggesting I address these issues. 29 Becker, Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations, 20; Frank Snare, “The Concept of Property,” American Philosophical Quarterly 9 (1972): 201. 30 Eugene C. Hargrove, “Preface,” in Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate, ed. Hargrove, xxii. Also, Kristin Schrader-Frechette, “Environmental Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics, ed. LaFollette, 212.