The Humane Society of the United States sponsored contraception experiments on deer, and also on untamed horses and burros, on bison and bears, birds, and even on African elephants. Why should the animal-advocacy community add yet another weapon to the arsenal humankind uses against the other communities on Earth?

Press for contraception as revenue-seeking agencies press for development, and soon untamed animals will be gone from the spaces that once belonged to them. Add animal farming to this and the situation is yet more dire. What does advocacy get when it promotes (a) expanded space for farm animals and (b) the idea that free-living animals can be chemically erased before they exist? Two results. More space for our sprawl, and fewer free animals in untamed spaces.

I get that the push for contraception is meant to be a humane alternative to arrows and guns. But advocates often support the erasure of free-living animals in lesser-evil dilemmas of our own making. Who says there are too many of them?

The vegan definition, with its emphasis on the reintegration of nature, obliges us to consider the territory and evolutionary freedom of other animals as well as their individual life experiences, and what we must do—including limiting our population growth. Not theirs.

The push for court-acknowledged “personhood” for nonhuman beings is covered in this chapter as well, and the risk that it could lend itself to yet another form of erasure.