Obviously, Zellin, but why would anyone in their right mind ever cast Speak With Animals as a regular spell in a setting where there is no time factor and 10 minutes or 5 hours or 2 seconds are impossible to tell apart?
No, the spell has the ritual tag and since we're never going to cast it in combat anyway, there's no reason whatsoever that it costs a spell slot to cast it.
For example that difference could be represented in an option to cast this spell after the conversation started. Warlock with Beast speech casts for free, someone else at the cost of a spell slot since it's doubtful that an animal will wait while you perform a 10 minutes ritual.
It could be added as a dialogue option at some future time, but right now the spell is purely something you cast in the hope that some animal you've seen will actually have something interesting to say. And since the animal will stick around after a short rest that takes an hour, and it will be there after a long rest that takes until next day, chances are that the animal is probably also going to stick around for a quick 10 minute ritual. They don't run off when a warlock summons their familiar, after all, and that's also a ritual.
Frankly, I don't know what your objection is to rangers and druids being able to cast a ritual-tagged non-combat spell as a ritual outside of combat. I'm just not seeing any problem in letting them have something the PHB clearly suggests they ought to have. This whole treehugger-specialist thing is what they're meant to do and intentionally breaking away from 5E RAW and RAI just to nerf them on this just doesn't seem right to me.
I hope they make it not cost a spell slot in BG3 in a future update!