 There are counterfactual suppositions for which the area law is not true. For example, imagine an island where the animals of the species “chicken” exclusively live on chicken farms. Suppose further that on these farms chicken are bred and held under extremely crowded conditions. So, the counterfactual supposition stemming from this example is “chicken on the island in question are bred under extremely crowded, artificial conditions set up by farmers”. Obviously, the area law will drastically fail to hold for this case. Moreover, cases of this kind are not far-fetched philosophical thought experiments: they do not occur rarely in times of cultivated breeding of animals (as required by the strategy of non-negligibility). Nevertheless, scientists exclude this kind of exceptions because it conflicts with the intended purpose and application of their discipline (in this case: island biogeography) (cf. Lange 2002, 417; Lange 2000, 232f. for further  examples[14]).