During this meeting of the Maastricht Foundations of Law Colloquia Eva Bernet Kempers from the University of Antwerp will speak about her article ‘Do rights of nature include animal rights?’ This article examines the intersection of the Rights of Nature (RoN) and animal rights, two increasingly influential paradigms in both academic discourse and judicial practice. While RoN has gained global recognition, with various jurisdictions attributing legal personality and/or rights to natural entities, the inclusion of individual wild animals within this framework remains contested. Animal rights scholars have expressed concerns that RoN might subsume or even undermine animal rights, reducing them to species-level protections and potentially leading to a form of ‘environmental fascism’. Environmental law scholars, on the other hand, are generally reluctant to accept the basic premises of animal rights, as this framework tends to privilege individual parts of the ecosystem (sentient animals) over others, thereby potentially endangering the ecological equilibrium. This article addresses these tensions by examining whether and how individual animals can be recognized as rights-holders within the RoN framework. It argues that, despite the apparent philosophical divergence between RoN and animal rights, the two paradigms can be reconciled in legal practice. By operationalizing RoN as a three-dimensional concept, the article seeks to transform the theoretical animosity between the two schools of thought into a juridically amicable relationship, ultimately proposing the recognition of individual animals as subjects of rights under the normative framework of Rights of Nature.