If Rivers Have Rights, do Fish Have Rights Too? Examining the Relationship Between Rights of Nature and Animal Rights

Abstract

Keywords

Animal rights, Rights of Nature, Estrellita case, personhood for nature

Suggested Citation Style:

Bernet Kempers, Eva (2026). If Rivers Have Rights, Do Fish Have Rights Too? Examining the Relationship Between Rights of Nature and Animal Rights. Journal of Animal Law, Ethics and One Health (LEOH), Special Issue on Rethinking Ecosphere and Biojustice: Legal Personality and Legal Rights Beyond the Human, 4-22. DOI: 10.58590/leoh.2026.005

* Postdoctoral researcher in animal law, University of Antwerp, Belgium, and Junior Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law, UK.

Content

• I. Introduction
• II. The Origin Story: Nature’s Rights and Animal Rights
• III. Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce: Tensions Between Nature’s and Animal Rights
• IV. Back Together Again: Animal Rights Within Nature’s Rights
• V. Couples Therapy: Addressing Objections
• VI. Conclusion

I. Introduction

The movement for rights of nature (RoN) is rapidly gaining traction.^[1] At the moment of writing, some forms of rights of nature are recognized in the Constitution of Ecuador,^[2] in judicial decisions in Colombia,^[3] Bangladesh,^[4] Peru,^[5] India,^[6] and in legislation in Uganda,^[7] New Zealand,^[8] the US,^[9] and Spain,^[10] among others.^[11] As the Inter-American Court of Human Rights noted in its Advisory Opinion adopted on 29 May 2025, we can observe a ‘a growing normative and jurisprudential trend that recognises Nature as a subject of rights.’^[12] According to the IACtHR, this trend may answer the need for a ‘systemic understanding of the multiple interactions that sustain life on the planet and requires recognizing humanity as one more expression of Nature's interdependent web’.^[13] Rights of nature (often shortly referred to as RoN) can now be characterized as a leading trend in environmental law,^[14] with a large body of academic literature assessing its potential implications.^[15] Whilst at first mainly present in the Global South, there is a growing support for and recognition of rights of nature in the European context as well, with Spain as the first jurisdiction to formally recognize the legal personhood of the lagoon ‘Mar Menor’ in 2022, which was ratified by the Spanish Constitutional Court in 2024.^[16]

To the question what exactly it means to recognize ‘rights’ of ‘nature’, however, no universal answer exists. Whereas some jurisdictions recognize ‘nature’ or ‘Pachamama’ as subject of law in a holistic manner,^[17] others have attributed legal personality to specific rivers, lagoons or parks.^[18] The question arises, therefore, what ‘nature’ exactly means, and which components of ‘nature’ are included under the normative framework of RoN.^[19] A particularly contentious and underexplored aspect of this debate is the status of individual wild animals within RoN-frameworks.^[20] If the rights of a river are recognized, does this recognition extend rights to the individual fish inhabiting the river, or does it solely pertain to the river ecosystem as a whole? Scholarship in both RoN as well as animal rights remains largely silent on this issue. In fact, many animal law scholars are skeptical about the increasing legal recognition of nature’s rights, arguing that natural entities cannot really ‘be’ legal persons in any meaningful way, contrary to sentient beings.^[21] Others have pointed to the dangers of the RoN-paradigm, as they fear that animal rights will be reduced to rights of species, falling victim to ‘environmental fascism’ when individual animals are sacrificed for the greater good.^[22] As Mark Sagoff stated already in 1984, the relationship between those striving for environmental protection and those striving for animal liberation can be characterized by ‘a bad marriage, quick divorce’ due to their diverging underlying ethical commitments.^[23] The position of individual animals in the rights of nature-framework thus remains particularly unclear.

This article aims to clarify this issue by exploring the position of individual animals within the narrative RoN, examining the relation between nature’s rights and animal rights in theory and legal practice. The central argument is that, in the context of the expanding body of so-called ‘ecological jurisprudence’,^[24] individual animals can and should be considered as rights-holders, but their sentience should be taken into account as a differentiating factor of interpretation. It argues for regarding RoN as an ‘open’ concept that allows for different levels or ‘dimensions’ of nature as having rights at the same time. The structure of this article follows the stages of a relationship, echoing Sagoff’s analogy, starting with an origin story of both narratives (section 2), followed by a ‘bad marriage, quick divorce’ (section 3), an effort to ‘go back together again’ (section 4); and finally an attempt to solve the conflicts through couples therapy by addressing some objections to regarding animal rights as nature’s rights (section 5).^[25] 

The central aim of this article is thus to shed light on the interaction between the RoN-framework and animal rights in theory and practice. In doing so, it will propose an understanding of RoN that is inclusive of animal rights instead of in tension with it. At the same time, it does not aim to argue for or against the recognition of RoN, but rather departs from the observation that RoN are a social fact; becoming a legal reality as we speak. In other words, the article is agnostic with regard to the question of what the ontological basis or justification of RoN is or should be: it discusses the place of animals within RoN once they have been legally recognized (for whatever reason), thus also leaving out the discussion on whether and to what extent indigenous perspectives underlie the RoN-approach.^[26] Hence, the article can be regarded as a proposal of how to approach individual animal rights within the broader framework of RoN once manifested in a particular context and culture.^[27]

II. The Origin Story: Nature’s Rights and Animal Rights^[28]

The idea of RoN is often traced back to Stone’s famous article ‘Should trees have standing?’.^[29] Here, Stone argued for the recognition of rights of trees and forests for the pragmatic reason of improving access to courts in name of these natural entities when they are damaged, overcoming the anthropocentric doctrine of standing, which requires ‘personal injury’ to human beings in order to initiate a case.^[30] Other (very different) influences are the theory of earth jurisprudence based on the eco-theological works of Berry,^[31] and the concept of ‘wild law’ developed by Cullinan and others.^[32] These approaches expand an environmentalist ethic, drawing from Leopold’s famous maxim that ‘a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community’.^[33] The paradigm of RoN is not homogeneous: it encompasses a diverse range of ideas in a varied range of cultural contexts.^[34] Nevertheless, according to Petel, we can distil a ‘common narrative’ that lies at the core of the paradigm.^[35] This narrative starts with the observation that the existing body of environmental law is problematically anthropocentric, and therefore unable to put a halt to environmental degradation caused by human action. As Borrás states, ‘legal systems treat the natural world as property that can be exploited and degraded, rather than as an integral ecological partner with its own rights to exist and thrive.’^[36] The idea then is that RoN, often infused with indigenous cosmologies and ideas, will help to make a transition from an exploitative and ultimately self-destructive relationship with nature, to one that honours the interrelation of all life, contributing to the health and integrity of the natural environment; it is sometimes presented as a ‘legal revolution that can save the world’.^[37] Proponents of RoN argue that granting legal rights to nature will radically transform the way we treat the environment and foster a different and more holistic and less anthropocentric form of environmental protection.^[38]

The actual legal manifestations of RoN are quite diverse, and only partly reflect the theoretical framework developed by aforementioned authors.^[39] Kauffman and Martin distinguish two main models: one in which ‘nature’ as such is granted rights in a holistic sense, and one in which certain specific natural objects are granted personhood or rights.^[40] The motivation to ascribe nature rights also varies and goes beyond environmental protection. The recognition of rights of rivers in New Zealand, for instance, was motivated for a large part by the aim to solve an ongoing land conflict between indigenous peoples and the state and thus did not solely aim to improve environmental protection.^[41] Other cases of rights of nature seem to be directed to recognition and legal incorporation of indigenous cosmovisions in plurinational societies.^[42] Moreover, the established sets of rights are multifarious.^[43] In many cases, the rights recognized for nature include new types of rights such as rights to ‘restoration’, ‘respect for existence’ and ‘integrity’, or ‘the right to flourish’.^[44]

The movement for RoN has been subjected to various critiques. On the one hand, there are authors that do not see its added value, and argue that the focus should lie upon improving the existing environmental protection laws by increasing their enforceability and strengthening standards of compliance.^[45] On the other hand, there are fears that RoN may reproduce unequal power relations by subsuming allegedly indigenous concepts and world visions into a liberal framework of ‘legal rights’, thereby rendering them subject to a (post-)colonial state.^[46] Instead of overcoming the nature versus culture divide, these authors fear that the paradigm risks ‘merely extending, replicating, and reinforcing existing systems of power without actually challenging them sufficiently’.^[47] Still others deny that nature ‘can’ have rights in any sensible way, as it does not have any clear, identifiable interests.^[48] Nevertheless, it is a fact that the jurisprudence and case law of RoN is growing steadily, with over 400 legislative initiatives currently pending worldwide, and an increasing number of Western jurisdictions incorporating a form of RoN.^[49]

The movement that strives for the recognition of animal rights has distinctly different origins and builds a different narrative around the purpose of rights. It starts from the premise that individual animals should have fundamental legal rights for the same reasons that humans have human rights. Aiming for the ‘liberation’ of animals from human domination,^[50] it employs a rhetoric of equality that is similar to that of the women’s rights movement, and the civil rights movement in the US. Excluding animals from legal rights and personhood is regarded a form of speciesism comparable to sexism and racism. As ‘species membership’ is a morally irrelevant criterion, it cannot form the basis of animals’ exclusion from legal rights: another capacity that explains the exclusionary limit of rights to humans has to be identified. However, as animal rights proponents maintain, once we look for such a capacity (eg rationality, autonomy, creativity, or language), we find that there is no single capacity that all humans do, but all other animals do not, possess to some degree. All grounds for human rights are either underinclusive, excluding some human beings as well, or overinclusive, also including animals.^[51] In order to consistently apply human rights, we need to accept that animals, too, belong in the circle of rights-bearers. Because this approach extends rights to animals on the basis of certain identifiable properties of animals (most often their ‘sentience’), we can refer to it as ‘properties-based animal rights’, or more specifically, ‘sentience-based animal rights’.^[52] Other arguments have however been made for ‘agency’ as the defining property that forms the ground for having rights,^[53] or ‘subject-of-a-life’^[54] or ‘vulnerability’,^[55] or combinations of ‘sentience’ and ‘intrinsic value’.^[56]

Animal rights understood in this sense are a response to ‘welfarism’, which represents the dominant paradigm of existing animal protection law. Even though animals are legally protected in most jurisdictions today, animal welfare acts only do so while assuming that using animals for human gain is acceptable.^[57] Animal protection laws are therefore often quite weak and badly enforced, protecting animals only insofar as it is in line with human interests in their use, and thus failing to protect any substantial interests of animals (such as the interest in life, or in bodily integrity).^[58] At most, they require the minimization of ‘unnecessary’ harm to animals, while leaving the definition of ‘necessary’ open to broad interpretation.^[59] Such laws may give the impression that they protect animals in a robust way, but, in reality, they further the traditional paradigm that classifies animals as ‘property’ of humans. Proponents of animal rights generally regard welfarist laws as insufficient and even immoral, as they continue (and perhaps even legitimize) the exploitation of animals for human use without ever questioning the exceptionalist status that humans grant themselves based on merely their species.^[60] Many animal rights advocates thus strive for a change in status of animals from property to person, protected with fundamental rights.^[61]

It should be noted that there are various differences between the animal rights positions that are grouped together here. Some animal rights approaches are ‘abolitionist’; they assume that, once animals have rights, most or all of the use we make of them will be banned.^[62] In early forms of animal rights abolitionism, the emphasis lay on negative obligations for humans, meaning that animals would primarily hold rights to ‘be free’ from human influence and thus would no longer be used for entertainment or food production. However, over the last decades, various more differentiated theories of animal rights have been developed. For instance, the political theory of ‘Zoopolis’ in 2011 suggested that animal rights should differ according to animals’ relation with human society, focusing on positive rather than only negative human obligations.^[63] The assumption is not that all interactions with other animals should be abolished, but rather that our relations with animals should be reshaped in a way that they become respectful rather than exploitative. This would mean that different rights would be held by wild animals, liminal animals, and domesticated animals respectively, correlating with active obligations of humans to provide animals with a certain standard of living.^[64] Others have critiqued the requirement of being a ‘person’ to have rights, instead suggesting that animals need their own kind of status that is less anthropocentric, for instance as ‘legal beings’^[65], or ‘non-personal subjects of law’^[66]. Furthermore, there are substantial differences with regard to the question of whether or not animal rights include the right to liberty and thus can be reconciled with having animals as companions. Cochrane famously argued for ‘animal rights without liberation’, stating that domesticated animals have no intrinsic interest in liberty, and therefore do not need rights to be free.^[67] Lastly, whereas some regard rights to be incompatible with animals’ status as property, others have suggested that animals could remain property while having rights at the same time, leading to the differentiation between ‘simple rights’ or ‘thin rights’ (rights that animals may have already based on welfarist protections) and ‘fundamental rights’ (rights to life and liberty comparable to those of humans).^[68] In short, there is a large and diverse landscape of approaches that fall within the paradigm of animal rights theory.

What many of these approaches have in common, however, is their liberal, individualistic basis,^[69] and the way in which they take the existing doctrine of human rights as starting point and expand them towards another group of living beings based on their individual characteristics. Animals have rights because they possess properties that are considered ethically relevant; it is the very nature of the animal individual that requires their inclusion in the circle of rights.^[70] It is largely due to this individualist orientation that sentience-based animal rights easily clash with the objectives of environmental protection. In order to argue for the inclusion of animals in the circle of rights-holders on the basis of the possession of a certain capacity, a necessary line has to be drawn between those entities that do, and those entities that do not possess the required characteristics: natural entities such as trees, and animals without sentience such as (arguably) insects, fall outside of the scope. Most animal rights scholars, thus, deny the idea that plants or other non-sentient entities could plausibly be regarded as ‘rights-holders’.^[71] 

Animal rights scholarship has also encountered critiques from various directions. On the one hand, animal welfarist scholarship argues that a better way to ensure sound animal protection is to improve the existing laws and their enforceability,^[72] suggesting that extending personhood to animals based on a capacity such as intelligence may have dangerous implications.^[73] On the other hand, critical legal scholars suggest that the liberal and individualist basis of animal rights only reproduce a certain paradigmatic human, privileging human-like animals at the expense of those that are not sufficiently ‘like us’, reinstalling a type of implicit anthropocentrism.^[74] What is clear, however, is that from the origin story, one can tell already that animal rights and nature’s rights are not a ‘match made in heaven’.

III. Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce: Tensions Between Nature’s and Animal Rights

We will zoom in a bit more on how the two approaches make a bad fit and give rise to what Sagoff in 1984 labelled as a ‘bad marriage, quick divorce’.^[75] First, with respect to the grounds of rights, animal rights proponents regard rights as the necessary result of a certain capacity animals possess (most notably their sentience). RoN, in contrast, just regard being ‘part of nature’ as a sufficient ground for rights, no matter what the individual capacities of an entity are. Second, both paradigms have different objectives. Animal rights strive for the emancipation of a group of beings formerly regarded and treated as ‘things’ as a matter of justice, whereas RoN are (often) presented as a solution to the failure of environmental protection law, reshaping our relationship with nature. Moreover, both tend to ascribe a different type of rights: whereas animal rights theory expands the current circle of individualistic human rights to a larger group of entities, RoN recognize nature as a whole as a subject of law, envisioning a more radical shift away from anthropocentrism, often invoking new rights such as ‘the right to restoration’, and implying a more systemic approach to nature as a ‘web of life’.^[76] They each pursue distinct goals, which translates into different strategies and priorities.

Two key tensions stand out in this regard that make the hypothesis of this article (recognizing animal rights within nature’s rights) seem particularly unlikely, which I label ‘the axiological problem’ (the different levels at which value is being assigned) and ‘the problem of scope’ (the different scope of animals that are included in animal rights and RoN respectively).

First, with regard to the axiological problem, the environmental orientation of RoN is associated with a form of systemic value assignation that regards species and ecosystems as loci of value rather than individual animals, whereas animal rights theory does the opposite, regarding the individual animal as only locus of value.^[77] As Kymlicka notes in this regard, ‘existing theories of animal rights are primarily concerned with protecting individual animals from harm, whereas the [rights of nature] framework is primarily concerned with the protection of animal species and their ecosystem habitats.’^[78] This tension became especially pronounced in 20th-century debates within environmental ethics, exemplified by the more practical matter of whether it is ethically permissible to cull certain populations or species to maintain an ecosystemic balance.^[79] In his seminal 1980 article, Baird Callicott characterized animal liberation and environmental ethics as distinct perspectives.^[80] Building on this, Sagoff famously summarized the two strands of thought as inherently incompatible. In his article Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce, he wrote:

• Environmentalists cannot be animal liberationists. Animal liberationists cannot be environmentalists. The environmentalist would sacrifice the lives of individual creatures to preserve the authenticity, integrity and complexity of ecological systems. The liberationist – if the reduction of animal misery is taken seriously as a goal – must be willing, in principle, to sacrifice the authenticity, integrity and complexity of ecosystems to protect the rights, or guard the lives, of animals.^[81]

Although this stark opposition was challenged by calls for a more integrative understanding,^[82] the underlying ethical divergence remains evident in practical situations. From the environmental perspective, prioritising sentient beings over other components of nature is problematic as it may lead to an ecological disbalance: the eradication of invasive species is often deemed necessary to protect ecosystem integrity, even if it involves harming individual animals.^[83] From the animal rights perspective, however, sacrificing individuals for the sake of abstract ecological wholes can resemble a form of “environmental fascism”, where beings with moral worth are subordinated to the “greater good” of species or ecosystems.^[84] As Corrigan puts it, ‘if protecting biodiversity is our goal, sentience is a poor criterion, and the animal liberation or animal rights approach is clearly inadequate.’^[85] In sum, for environmentalists, the protection of nature may justify the sacrifice of individual animals – even to save an endangered plant – whereas for animal rights theorists, nature is valuable only insofar as it supports the flourishing of sentient beings. The axiological problem (assigning value to different levels; systemic versus individual) thus translates into a practical problem that, if RoN are recognized, it may lead to the sacrifice of individual animals when they pose a danger to the ecosystem: a result that animal rights proponents cannot accept.

Second, with regard to the problem of scope, animal rights scholarship has traditionally focused on the liberation of domesticated animals from human exploitation, while environmental approaches tend to focus exclusively on protecting wild species, leaving domesticated animals largely outside of the scope of concern. In fact, environmental thinkers sometimes even regard domesticated animals as products of human culture – ecologically disruptive and thus not part of the “nature” that should be protected in the sense that wild animals are. As Baird Callicott provocatively stated:

• From the perspective of the land ethic a herd of cattle, sheep, or pigs is as much or more a ruinous blight on the landscape as a fleet of four-wheel drive off-road vehicles (…) they constitute yet another mode of extension of the works of man into the ecosystem (…) They have been bred to docility, tractability, stupidity, and dependency. It is literally meaningless to suggest that they be liberated.^[86]

Such a view is deeply controversial within animal rights scholarship, which sees domesticated animals, and particularly farmed animals, as among the most systematically oppressed and therefore most urgently in need of rights. As Kymlicka notes, the ‘implicit or explicit legitimation of the instrumentalization of domesticated animals can be found in a wide range of recent theorizing about “earth jurisprudence”, “the rights of nature”, or “wild law”, and this is increasingly noted as the central dividing line between [these] theories and animal rights theories.’^[87] This second tension (the problem of scope) thus translates into the practical issue that, when RoN are recognized, domesticated animals may not be included in the scope of beings that are assigned rights. Nevertheless, as we will see in the next section, both problems can be overcome in the manifestation of RoN in a particular legal system.

IV. Back Together Again: Animal Rights Within Nature’s Rights

Despite these tensions, the legal interpretation of RoN in particular jurisdictions, has until now often been understood as inclusive of animal rights, encompassing the animal rights approach, as it were. RoN, in these instances, seems to be framed as an open and flexible paradigm which does not presume setting out a universalist catalog of rights, but rather leaves it to the context and situation to assign the kind of rights suitable for that particular aspect of nature. Thereby, it leaves ample room for judicial interpretation.^[88] Among the parts of nature recognized as rights-holders hitherto, are also individual animals.^[89] In the interpretation of the courts, animal rights and RoN are thus brought ‘back together again’.^[90]

The most informative case that addressed the question of the place of animals within RoN in-depth, is the judgement on the monkey Estrellita, which was decided by the Constitutional Court of Ecuador in 2022.^[91] In this case, which concerned a woolly monkey living in captivity, the Court brought wild animals within the scope of art 74 of the Constitution, which recognizes the RoN.^[92] It made clear that ‘[w]ithin the levels of ecological organization, an animal is a basic unit of ecological organization, and being an element of Nature, it is protected by the rights of Nature and enjoys an inherent individual value.’^[93] Seemingly unaware of any axiological tension, it confirmed that ‘the rights of nature do not only protect species but also a particular animal, since it would not be possible to recognize an intrinsic value to nature as a whole and neglect the same value to its elements’.^[94] It furthermore emphasized that ‘[i]n this sense, this Court warns that animals should not be protected only from an ecosystemic perspective or with a view to the needs of human beings, but mainly from a perspective that focuses on their individuality and intrinsic value.’^[95] It thus seems to maintain the focus on individual animal rights within nature’s rights, seemingly avoiding the submersion of their individuality into the more systemic framework of RoN.

Another case that similarly derives animal rights from RoN, is the case of the fox Run Run in Peru, decided in 2024.^[96] Just like Estrellita, the fox Run Run was kept in captivity, and a writ of Amparo was filed on its behalf. A court in Lima approached the case from a RoN-perspective (even though RoN have, contrary to Ecuador, not been recognized in the constitution).^[97] It stated that the status of nature as subject of rights is ‘shared with all the elements that make up Nature.’ This means, according to the court, that ‘animals should not be protected solely from the perspective of human needs (…) but rather that their protection should be based on the intrinsic individual value of each specimen as part of a harmonious whole.’^[98] Nevertheless, rather than regarding animals as of value only because their contribution to ecosystems, the Court emphasizes their sentience and capacities as reasons for their individual worth. This leads to the conclusion that: animals as sentient beings, ‘beings capable of feeling’, enables differentiated protection as members of nature. ‘Therefore, this Court, following the doctrine of animal rights based on the concept of “sentient beings” and in light of the “ecocentric” theory or approach, seeks to guarantee the protection and preservation of wild animals as autonomous beings who are part of Nature, and thus the protection of the rights of “Zorro Run Run”.’^[99] In a way quite similar to the Estrellita case, animal rights are brought under the scope of nature’s rights, while their individuality and sentience are still recognized as important characteristics that imply a ‘differentiated’ form of protection. Even though this judgment was declared null by a higher court, the way in which this court approached the issue is still very telling.

The interpretation of both the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court and the Peruvian court suggest that the axiological problem does not in any way prevent the allocation of rights at the systemic and individual level at the same time.^[100] In his discussion of the Estrellita case, Gutmann recognizes that ‘the dispute between biocentrism [individualistic] and ecocentrism [systemic] loses importance because there is no fundamental contradiction between the rights of (individual) animals and the rights of nature’.^[101] Indeed, in the Estrellita-case, the Constitutional Court literally regarded animal rights as ‘a specific dimension – with their own particularities – of the rights of Nature’.^[102] The solution here seems to lay in the word ‘dimension’. As suggested by Agustín Grijalva Jiménez (former judge in the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court), ‘we must understand the rights of nature to be multidimensional rights’.^[103] In previous work, I operationalized this notion as meaning that RoN exist not only at the holistic level, but also at the more systemic dimension of specific ecosystems, species, and collectives – since nature is essentially made up of such collectives – and at the individualistic dimension of separate entities – since such collectives are, in turn, made up of individual entities.^[104] Or, in the words of the Peruvian court, ‘the law protects both Nature (as rights-holder) and the organisms or members that compose it’.^[105] This would mean that, indeed, if rivers have rights, fish have rights too: recognizing the rights of a river entails recognizing rights not only at the level of the ecosystem, but also, indirectly, at the individualist level of the fish living within the river. Contrary to the traditional narrative of animal rights, however, the ground for such rights can be found, not in the capacities of the elements, but in their being part of the greater whole that has been recognized as a rights-holder.

Whether the rights of species, individuals, or ecosystems are at stake, then, depends on the particular case at hand. In some instances, a certain human activity (eg the establishment of a dam) will threaten populations or species of animals. In others (eg the hunting of jaguars, or cases of wild animals in captivity), it will be the individual level that plays a role, as there may be no substantial harm caused to the species or populations. In yet other cases, the harm is not suffered by a particular species, but to ecosystems as a whole (eg pollution of water sources close to a mangrove forest). It will thus depend on the circumstances and kind of harm that is at stake, which level of nature’s rights will be invoked in court.

In sum, whereas it may be difficult at a philosophical level to conceive of how species can have rights (eg to not get extinct) at the same time as individuals have rights (eg not to suffer) – given that the ontological levels at which rights are assigned differ – in law this is more easily imaginable. It is comparable, for instance, to the co-existence of individual human rights and the collective rights of indigenous peoples: there is nothing about the existence of rights of peoples that inherently contradicts the fact that the individuals of which such peoples are made up, also hold their own individual rights. The tension between environmental protection and animal liberation as set out in the debates between Sagoff and Baird Callicot in the 20^th century, is therefore not necessarily mirrored in the relation between the recognition of nature’s rights and animal rights: they can in fact be integrated. Whereas ethical theories present full-fledged, comprehensive models that must be internally consistent, the particular manifestation of law is largely a pragmatic tool. The axiological tension thus does not hinder the assignation of rights to individual animals under a RoN-framework, and RoN and animal rights are, at the very least, able to cohabitate within one legal system.

V. Couples Therapy: Addressing Objections

The above discussion illustrates that animal rights can be, and has been, regarded as a dimension of nature’s rights within particular legal systems. A critical reader will notice however that neither court specifies how the two more practical problems (the sacrifice of individual animals and the exclusion of domesticated animals) are overcome. As both example cases discussed here concerned wild animals, it remains unclear what the implications of RoN are for domesticated animals: are they in fact included under RoN? Therefore, potential objections to viewing animal rights as nature’s rights should still be addressed. Their coexistence is not entirely harmonious; some effort is needed to resolve the recurring conflicts.

First is the objection arising from the axiological problem: the danger that, even if animal rights are formally regarded part of RoN, the interests of individual animals will automatically lose out when balanced against higher levels, which would mean that the environmental paradigm would overrule any animal rights concerns. This would be problematic since, as generations of animal rights scholars have convincingly argued – and as scientific evidence supports – there is something that distinguishes sentient beings from non-sentient entities: most notably, the ability to care about their own well-being, to experience sensations, and to aim to avoid harm and seek pleasure.^[106] Nevertheless, rather than drawing a hard line between sentient beings as rights-holders and non-sentient beings as objects without rights, the RoN-framework allows for a more open structure in which capacities such as sentience are not the ground for rights, but taken into account during the balancing exercise and interpretation of rights: they are what we could call ‘differentiating factors of interpretation’.^[107] Essentially, this comes down to the recognition that ‘harm’ means something different in every particular context. Due to their sentience and capacity to suffer both mentally and physically, sentient animals can be exposed to a much wider range of harms than non-sentient entities. For example, captivity is arguably not a harm to a plant, which lacks an interest in roaming freely, whereas it is (in most cases) a harm to a wild animal. Understood as such, sentience does not necessarily create a hierarchy that places animals above other parts of nature, but it does expand the range of human actions that are potentially problematic as they may infringe upon sentient animals’ rights. In this way, it influences how conflicts between rights are resolved. Sentience, thus, serves as a differentiating factor in the interpretation of RoN that defines the kind of rights held by an entity, rather than being the ground for holding rights to begin with.

This differentiating factor of interpretation comes into play when conflicts arise between levels, as a balancing exercise must take place that takes account of the relevant capacities or situations of the entities involved. Such conflicts may for instance occur when individual animals introduced by humans threaten the continued existence of ecosystems or collectives. In such cases, existing legal techniques can be employed to ensure that the sentience of animals is taken into account to a sufficient extent. As Futhazar points out, ‘a potential clash of rights between ecosystems and individual animals is not inherently problematic, as this issue can be solved by applying legal techniques already developed within the field of human rights’.^[108] A particularly relevant instrument here is the proportionality test, which is the principal method used in constitutional and human rights law to resolve conflicts between rights. This method can essentially also be applied to conflicts between different components of nature’s rights. For example, if a regulation permits the eradication of certain species, it should be assessed against the core elements of the proportionality test: (a) whether the regulation pursues a legitimate aim, and (b) whether the measure is suitable, necessary, and proportionate in the strict sense.^[109] Even if safeguarding the balance of an ecosystem were considered a legitimate aim, the measure would still have to be suitable, necessary and proportional. Concretely, this requires an assessment of the least invasive method of interference. Rather than killing individual sentient animals, it would for instance be more proportionate to prevent their reproduction; a method that was applied in cases such as the grey squirrels in the UK, as well as the famous case of the Escobar hippos in Colombia.^[110] Compared to other options (such as the use of toxins or culling of populations), this method is more respectful of individual animals’ rights, while also addressing the systemic and holistic dimensions of nature’s rights. In this way, some of the basic tenets of the sentient-based animal rights framework are, as it were, incorporated into nature’s rights, thereby safeguarding the importance of the individual sentient animal within the more holistic paradigm. Moreover, also from a RoN-perspective, killing individual animals in order to save something abstract like a ‘species’ is questionable, as Gellers convincingly argues.^[111] Thus, the two paradigms may be closer aligned than is often assumed.

Second is the objection from the problem of scope: the danger that the RoN-framework is unsuitable for domesticated animals and will exclude them from rights-protection. Rutledge-Prior explicitly rejects the nature-based route to animal rights for this reason.^[112] She warns that the RoN narrative risks obscuring animals’ individuality and fails ‘to provide a platform for those of animals’ interests that are not necessarily related to ecosystem health’, most notably those of domesticated animals.^[113] This concern finds some corroboration in the earlier discussed Estrellita case, where the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court explicitly stated that ‘practices such as the domestication of animals for companionship or labor, their breeding for slaughter and consumption, their captivity for species protection, scientific research, and education, as well as other forms of interaction developed by different societies over time, cannot be undermined by a judicial decision (…)’.^[114] Nevertheless, some nuance should be made here. Even though this statement in the Estrellita-case is often interpreted by animal rights scholars as thus not recognizing the rights or interests of domesticated animals, this seems too quick a conclusion. The judgment may not reflect the traditional abolitionist perspective on animal rights – as discussed in the first section, based on negative obligations for humans and the necessary end of practices such as animal agriculture – but can still be regarded as potentially consistent with more differentiated and non-ideal political theories of animal rights that emphasize positive obligations towards animals depending on their relation to human societies.^[115] Indeed, the Ecuadorian Court did not categorically exclude domesticated animals from the RoN-framework: it only stated that the recognition of rights for animals through judicial decision cannot undermine existing practices of animal use, but left the option open this could happen through legislative acts, or that animals would still have certain rights in the context of these practices.

The following points further strengthen the suggestion that domesticated animals can be indirectly included in the scope of nature’s rights. First, the jurisprudence and doctrine of RoN are still relatively recent and unsettled, leaving conceptual space for a broader interpretation of nature’s rights. As the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court said in Estrellita, RoN are non-exhaustive, meaning that there is an ‘obligation not to restrict them to a closed catalogue or numerus clausus structure. Rather, they must be understood as a form of legal protection of an open-ended clause – one that is not limited to guaranteeing only those rights expressly set out in positive legal texts, but also all those rights which, although not explicitly contemplated in a normative body, are suitable for the protection of Nature.’^[116] The ‘open’ nature of RoN thus makes it possible to, at a later time, include domesticated animals as well. This is also suggested by scholars such as Peters, who titles her chapter ‘Rights of Nature Include Rights of Domesticated Animals’.^[117] Second, as some suggest, our current use of domesticated animals reflects precisely the type of human exceptionalism that RoN sets out to disarm; as Kymlicka states, the ‘instrumentalization and commodification of domesticated animals has always been the lynchpin of ideologies of human supremacism and, so long as it remains untouched, modern societies, cultures, and economies will continue to be defined and shaped by supremacist beliefs.’^[118] This would mean that, also for RoN, the decommodification of animals will be an essential aspect of the shift to a paradigm of more harmony with nature. Finally, even the Ecuadorian Court itself, while cautious in its judgment, required the legislature to adopt a bill of rights for animals, which indeed also includes the rights of domesticated animals.^[119] Even though the Estrellita-case did not explicitly include domesticated animals, it is thus still the origin for a new law that recognizes the rights of all animals, including domesticated ones. Taken together, we have a sound argument against the objection that domesticated animals will be necessarily excluded from the RoN -framework.

Nevertheless, proponents of more abolitionist forms of animal rights may still object that animal rights, when framed as a dimension of the RoN, cannot truly be regarded as ‘fundamental rights’ in the sense understood within animal rights theory. Instead, they argue that these rights should be designated as ‘simple rights’: welfare protections that fail to safeguard animals’ substantial interests – comparable, for instance, to the ‘right to be stunned while slaughtered’.^[120] Condoy Truyenque makes this argument in her analysis of the Estrellita case, stating that ‘the recognition of rights for animals under the Rights of Nature does not constitute significant progress for animals.(...) [A]s the Estrellita case shows, rights for animals under the Rights of Nature remains a welfarist conservationist system.’^[121] This interpretation appears to be supported, at least in part, by the Court’s affirmation that ‘insofar as the human being is a predator, and being omnivorous by nature, they cannot be prohibited from exercising their right to feed on other animals.’^[122]

However, if we separate the question of whether animals hold actual legal rights under a RoN-framework from the question of whether this constitutes ‘significant progress’ – which arguably depends on the normative ideal one adopts – there are many reasons to answer the first in the affirmative. First, the Constitutional Court explicitly recognizes animals as ‘subjects of rights’, and the rights it attributes to wild animals go beyond minimal welfare or conservationist protections. For example, the recognition of ‘the right to the free development of their natural behavior’ suggests a more substantive concern for animals’ autonomy.^[123] Although classical liberal rights such as the right to life or bodily integrity are not included here, the rights granted clearly protect more than trivial interests and aim to ensure that wild animals can live and develop their lives. Second, and perhaps more importantly, recognizing animals as subjects of rights under the RoN-framework has direct procedural consequences. As part of extending constitutional rights to animals, the Ecuadorian Court effectively opened the doors of justice to them, granting animals standing to sue and empowering them to claim their rights before competent authorities.^[124] Because the RoN are fully justiciable through constitutional guarantees, any person may now bring a suit on behalf of animals, and legal mechanisms such as Habeas Corpus and the writ of Amparo can be used in the name of animal rights.^[125] This clearly goes beyond a welfarist paradigm, in which harm to animals is only legally relevant insofar as it affects their human owner, and animals themselves are unable to initiate legal proceedings.

Although this discussion is primarily based on the Ecuadorian example, it nonetheless suggests that extending rights to all animals through the RoN-framework is both judicially feasible and conceptually coherent. When RoN are understood as a broad and flexible umbrella concept without a numerus clausus – one that accommodates contextual and local diversity and allows for varied interpretations regarding which parts of nature possess which rights – the conclusion reached in this article appears logical: animals, both wild and domesticated, can potentially hold fundamental rights under a RoN-framework. This is precisely because the narrative of RoN resists the universalizing tendencies of Western law and avoids imposing abstract, overarching models of which entities hold which rights that would be applicable everywhere in the same manner.

The question then becomes whether it is desirable to regard animals as rightsholders under the RoN. In line with my previous point, it becomes clear that the answer depends on the version of animal rights one adheres to. Traditional abolitionist thinkers would, in many cases, reject the RoN-approach, as it does not guarantee the recognition of rights such as the right to life or bodily integrity, nor the total abolition of animal use in society that they envision. In contrast, zoopolitans who support a more pragmatic account of political rights may endorse the RoN-perspective,^[126] since many of the practices they oppose – such as factory farming and recreational hunting – would also be incompatible with the rights of animals under this paradigm, and the ‘right to develop one’s natural behaviour’ of wild animals aligns, to some extent, with the view of wild animals as ‘sovereigns’, whose autonomy should be respected. Feminist approaches to animal rights might also be open to viewing animal rights as nature’s rights, as this route bypasses the problematic structure of the ‘Anthropos’ by not requiring animals to be classified as ‘persons’ in order to possess rights.^[127] Indeed, in neither the Estrellita nor the Run Run-case, any reference to animals as ‘persons’ or the strong ‘similarity’ of certain mammals with human beings was made.

Irrespective of one’s specific views, the nature-based route to animal rights, at the very least, offers a fresh new perspective to animal rights that avoids some of the pitfalls of the traditional narrative. Even though recent conceptualizations of animal rights have developed more attention for the context of animals, there is still a tendency in animal rights scholarship to treat animals as isolated individuals, disconnected from the environment, defined by a (human-like) capacity that structures their abstract identity as ‘the animal’ with a claim to rights.^[128] Hence, rather than a threat, the recognition of RoN could be regarded an opportunity for animal rights scholars to move beyond, what Gellers qualifies as a ‘rather stale debate over the type of human trait that offers the most compelling grounds for treating animals like more than mere machines’.^[129] Indeed, in that sense, the traditional argument for animal rights retains a certain degree of anthropocentrism, furthering the binary structure of person v. thing, at most slightly broadening the scope of entities included in the first. As Favre has argued, even though it claims to be revolutionary, the sentient-based animal rights narrative is built upon the same epistemological premise (an individual and independent legal subject) and axiological premise (the summa divisio between a valuable person and thing with a price) as the status quo, reiterating the ‘deep structure of modern law’.^[130] In the emphasis on a salient characteristic, ‘one can see how the logic of human exceptionalism extends beyond the human, operating as a yardstick to measure the beingness and value of diverse lifeforms and elements of Nature’.^[131] The nature-based route therefore offers a road to animal rights in which the similarity-argument is not necessary and animals can be valued for whom they are, arguably facilitating a more radical ‘de-centralization’ of the human than the traditional capacity-based narrative of animal rights is able to.^[132]

Lastly, the desirability of fostering a convergence between the two, can also be established in a more strategic sense. After all, the successes of the animal rights movement remain very limited until now, with less than handful of successful cases establishing animal rights and personhood.^[133] In the 1980s debate between environmental and animal ethics, philosophers such as Jamieson noted that, despite their divergences, animal liberation and environmental ethics have some ‘common enemies’, for instance in the ‘destructive forces at work ravaging the non-human world’.^[134] Today, such common enemies can be found in the form of large, multinational companies that produce animal products in cruel and unsustainable ways, in particular the Big Meat and intensive farming industries, as pointed out by Montes Franceschini and Stilt.^[135] Also from this more pragmatic perspective, it would be sensible for both to overcome the theoretical divergence between their ways of thinking in light of the greater challenges of our times.^[136]

VI. Conclusion

Now that RoN are being increasingly incorporated in legal systems, the question arises as to whether the recognition of rights at the systemic level, may include the recognition of rights at the individual level as well. Are animals only relevant as ‘specimen’ of a species that is either endangered or not, in line with the more systemic approach of nature conservation, or do they have rights as individual beings? Until now, the views have remained divided. While it is certain that there is a certain degree of incompatibility between the ethical paradigms underlying them, which stood central in the 1980s debate, I have argued in this article that the divergence can be overcome when legally integrating the two approaches in a specific legal system. RoN can and should be conceptualized as an open, multi-dimensional concept, including the rights of individual animals. Understood as such, we can arrive at a more animal-friendly interpretation and articulation of RoN, employing existing legal techniques to solve conflicts between rights, and expanding the framework gradually to domesticated animals. This reimagining takes into account the pressing environmental crises of our time, acknowledging that the well-being and rights of animals (including human animals) are intrinsically linked to the broader ecological context.^[137]

Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank the Foundations of Law group at Maastricht University for their input and comments on an earlier version of this article (and in particular Dr Lukasz Dziedzic); Prof Sanja Barić and her team for organizing a wonderful conference in Rijeka where this article was presented, and in particular the two marvelous peer reviewers, whose comments greatly contributed to the quality of the article.

Copyright (c) 2026 Eva Bernet Kempers

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