Civil government otherwise deserves rebuke as unnatural and so far perverse, immoral and unworthy of our cooperation, according to our best traditions of revolution and reform. Regarding the animals, these involve no new kinds of rights but are a different class of rights holders. We see how animals easily come by civil rights. Civil governments have laws on the books extending such rights by criminalizing cruelty to animals, criminalizing the taking of wild animals deemed endangered, etc. But the notion that animals have natural rights makes no such sense.
Natural rights belong to moral discourse and association.
Animals made by the same Creator who made us, have no entry upon moral discourse. They have not gone so far to entertain moral positions dogmatically, nor yet wasted the substance of their lives in thrall to moral blindness, whether of supernaturalist or atheist and agnostic varieties. We make nonsense of the natural facts of life, repudiate all moral sincerity and, in this, set new records for moral benightedness by extending natural rights to animals. This preliminary analysis of rights only makes more urgent the prior question of faith. We have roughed out just the main distinctions of natural from supernatural and human rights, of natural from civil rights and of natural from animal rights.