The subject of this paper is human perception of animals and their rights. The paper researches how human lives and those of animals are intertwined, how much we influence each other in many ways and how humans depend on animals while in return, we don’t grant them many rights or sufficient legal protection. Especially considering that granting and respecting the rights of animals has been discovered to be crucial for the progress of the human society and its ecological sustainability. One of the main topics discussed in the paper is the current state of legal protection of animals and the correlations between that and the negative influence of our anthropocentric point of view combined with the modern man’s distance from nature and other living beings. In order to provide a base for the discussion, the paper lists clauses and articles of the Croatian law designed to protect the rights of animals but which unfortunately do not provide sufficient legal protection of animals without an uniform and correct application of the laws in legal practice. The goal of this paper is to present the reader with a different point of view and encourage her to accept animals as beings of a high emotional intelligence. In order to achieve that, the paper unveils facts and current states of affairs that the reader might not have previously been aware of and attempts to prove how the key in raising the quality of the coexistence between animals and humans is better education, positive public perception of animals and at the same time also the more demanding while urgent regulations and restrains of our current consumerist tendencies.