This chapter aims to provide conceptual clarity on animals’ current legal status by addressing the long-debated question of whether they can have legal rights. By taking a legal positivist approach to legal rights, I suggest that there are no conceptual barriers to animal legal rights – whether we draw on the interest or the will theory of rights. Furthermore, by considering an example of animal welfare legislation that recognises the ‘intrinsic value’ of animals, we see evidence that certain animals already have legal rights. Nevertheless, even the strongest animal welfare laws are replete with exemptions that protect the interests of human individuals and industries that subject animals to poor levels of welfare or outright cruelty. As such, the legal rights that animals do have are weak. Finally, the chapter addresses three counters to the claim that animals have legal rights: welfare, enforcement, and personhood objections. With none of these objections posing a fatal challenge to animals’ legal rights, we can move on to the next chapter to consider what, precisely, is in the way of animals’ greater legal inclusion if not their rightlessness per se.

The chapter argues that a commitment to human rights necessarily entails basic environmental protection duties as a matter of political morality. This is because egregious forms of environmental harm critically undermine the fundamental values that underpin human rights, chiefly human dignity and autonomy. Human rights must therefore contain a sub-category of protections which we can conceptualise as environmental human rights. The human interests that environmental human rights protect are the environmental conditions necessary for the preservation and flourishing of human life, namely clean water, food, air, and soil within a functioning ecosystem that includes diverse species of plants and wildlife. Those who challenge these rights as vague overlook the significant room for agreement in the pursuit of a comprehensive and universal notion of a ‘sound’ environment. Meanwhile, converns over potential conflicts with other rights are overstated, because balancing of competing interests is a pervasive and well-established feature of human rights law and contemporary environmental regulations are already being challenged on the basis of competing rights, for instance to property.