Hunting and Conservation

One further thought about the Sierra Club and other organizations that Singer takes to task for not opposing hunting: they were able to build large popular constituencies precisely by crafting a big tent for various supporters of the natural world. Prominent among those supporters were some of the people who spend the most time appreciating it -- hunters and fishers. Thus their appeal was to nature at large, not individual animals in particular. Depending on what their actual beliefs were, this might have been a principled decision, or it might have been a compromise of their principles in search of support. Singer's critique might be more nuanced if he teased out which it was.