<p>This paper interrogates the conceptual and ethical limits of Rights of Nature (RoN) discourses in Indigenous ecological contexts. RoN frameworks are lauded for challenging anthropocentric environmental governance since they recognise nature as a rights-bearing entity, and are seen as more attuned with Indigenous worldviews. But, they may still reproduce state-centric and universalist modes of conservation and habitat protection. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Nagaland and Kalimpong (near Sikkim border) between 2022 and 2023, the paper explores state-led and Indigenous relationalities around birds and animals responsible for crop losses as a revealing lens through which to examine these tensions. By following the trajectories of the peacock and the <i>fuzi</i> (<i>Chestnut munia</i>), it highlights the incongruities between state law, conservation policies, and Indigenous agroecological knowledge. Indigenous farmers’ practices of ‘living with’ creatures experienced as ‘pests’ articulate relational ethics grounded in coexistence, obligation, and situated judgment. The paper argues that for RoN frameworks to genuinely decolonise environmental governance, they must shift from juridical notions of rights towards dialogical, relational modes of multispecies co-existence that recognise the ethics and plurality of Indigenous agrarian lifeworlds.</p>