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Kick The Dog
Cobra Commander shows how it's done.
Or the scene, where the villain is mean ... that's entertainment!
"That's Entertainment," from The Band Wagon, 1953

"I'm gonna beat Batista like a bag of puppies."
Triple H, WWE Monday Night Raw

Although not known for his stunning success record, perhaps Megatron's greatest military victory occurred when he ordered his Decepticons to murder a puppy.
Murdered puppy, Teletraan I

The exact opposite of the Pet The Dog moment. This indicates the fodder of anything resembling a modern-day Morality Play.

Essentially, Kick The Dog is used to show that deep down inside, a character is scum, incompatible with the moral rules of the series that they're in. This is the audience's cue that it's "okay" for the character to meet their end.

It doesn't have to be a dog. It's any act or statement that shows the character's meanness or out-and-out evil, such as a boss demanding an employee come to work during Christmas when the employee's kid is in the hospital, or stealing from a blind beggar's coin dish, or a vicious No Holds Barred Beatdown on the hero or one of his dearest friends.

If an animal is used, however, a dog is usually the pet of choice, partly out of connotations of blind loyalty, partly from tradition. Arguably, however, substituting a cat can be even more shocking. After all, even bad guys like cats. So, the argument goes, if someone goes out of his or her way to harm one, they must really be a bastard.

Dog-kickings can be verbal as well, when a line of dialogue is used to shock the audience with its sheer repugnance. If it's uttered in the presence of the hero in an action series, he'll echo the audience's thoughts and tell the villain "You're insane!"

This trope is common in horror-based Monster Of The Week shows, often to set up the Asshole Victim for the Twilight Zone Twist. For example, if you saw someone Kick The Dog in Tales From The Crypt, rest assured that this someone would be eaten by zombies by the end of the episode. Anthologies are especially prone to this, as they have to set up their villains really quickly, since they only have one episode to tell their story. This can be played up by having the very same kick of cruelty be the cause of their downfall.

This is also common in cartoons. Someone who does this can be legally harassed by Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, The Warner Brothers and their Sister Dot, etc. The Screwy Squirrel, however, doesn't need one of these.

Death By Sex is only a possible example of this trope, as while there are some who strongly oppose any sort of premarital sex, they're probably not enough of a majority to make the act enough of a cue, especially in horror film audiences. Plus, in a slasher film, you're dead anyway, unless you're the main character or the Love Interest; premarital sex just speeds the process up a bit.

A more benign, and more comedic, form of this shows the immorality of the villain by having them cheat at Solitaire. Of course, it's also possible for one of these acts to go waaay too far in the other direction... If you kill the dog in a vicious and cruel manner, the villain has gone that far.

Compare with Cant Get Away With Nuthin, And Your Little Dog Too, Kick Them While They Are Down.
Examples:

Anime and Manga
  • Kaiser in Yu-Gi-Oh GX, following his Freak Out, originally just came off as an unfeeling, disrespectful jerk who liked dressing in black; if anything, his new bad-boy persona only increased his popularity in the eyes of the fangirls... until he nearly killed his little brother in a duel.
  • In the manga version of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Kaworu Nagisa kills a kitten, going along with the Japanese switch of Petting The Dog with a cat. He justifies this by saying that, since neither he nor Shinji would care for the kitten, which was orphaned, it would die a slow, painful death through starvation if he didn't intervene. Still, seeing someone squeeze the life out of a poor, innocent kitten is... disturbing, to say the least. Tokyo-3 may not have a Humane Society, and all the people there are probably preoccupied with more important things, but he still gained the Fan Nickname "Evil Manga Kaworu" for this.
  • In Revolutionary Girl Utena, we learn early enough that Nanami is The Libby. We know she's a deceptive and manipulative bully. We know she's insanely jealous of her brother Touga's time, and that she idolizes him to an almost sexual degree. But she only really becomes freaky when we get the flashback: She's six or so, and her brother gets a cute little kitten and pays more attention to it than he does to her, even while he's talking to her. She puts the thing in a box and pushes it over a waterfall (into a water treatment center?). She does run away crying, so you could say she's not as cold as some. But then she says something like, "I'm sorry, I had to do it!" Brrrr.
    • Interestingly enough, it was her who gave him the kitten in the first place. To her credit though, the imagery heavily implies that she didn't understand the impact of her deed until the last moment and her final words were a futile attempt to justify the whole episode to herself.
  • In Elfen Lied, Lucy lived in an orphanage when she was younger, where the other children often harassed her because of her cute little horns and emotionless nature. Soon after she started caring for a puppy, the others forced her to watch as they quite literally kicked the dog and beat it to death with a vase, just to try and get her to show something. They got more than they bargained for: Lucy snapped and left no witnesses.
    • Played with near the very beginning of the series, when Mayu is first introduced. After leaving the house, Lucy stares for a while at Mayu's dog, which tied to a post near the front gate. It seems like she actually killed the dog for real... but the only thing she did was cut its rope.
  • The anime series Nightwalker includes a villain who feeds on dogs.
  • Long before he became a vampire, Dio Brando, Big Bad of Jojos Bizarre Adventure, introduced himself to Jonathan Joestar by kicking his dog Danny in the head.
    • And then in Part 3, Vanilla Ice literally kicks the dog (Iggy) to reinforce his utter admiration of and loyalty to Dio. Iggy had used his stand to create a sand-based image of Dio, and Vanilla Ice was enraged at being forced to destroy the image when it attacked him.
  • A Pokemon episode titled "Here's Looking At You, Elekid" features Jessie of Team Rocket forcing James to sell his Victreebel for a special Weepinbell. When the new Weepinbell evolves, she gets rid of it as well.
  • Whenever Wakamatsu Madoka, the heroine's bitchy rival in Full Moon O Sagashite, looks like she might be getting too sympathetic, she is shown being cruel to her adorable pet pig, thereby cementing her reputation of bitchiness.
  • We are first introduced to Teresa of the Faint Smile in Claymore when she casually splatters bystanders flicking the blood from her sword after killing a Yoma, then hints that failure to give the payment for her services to the correct traveller will result in more attacks and no help. In the next town she literally kicks a young girl the local Yoma kept for 'entertainment' halfway across a street in an unsuccessful attempt to dissuade her from following. It was only after the kid's persistence and an encounter with bandits pushes her into Morality Pet status that we learn her name (Clare) and realize this is the Backstory of the previous chapters' protagonist.
  • The climax of the Rurouni Kenshin movie has the Japanese army surrounding a small force of rebels, stopped while Kenshin goes in to try talking them (and their leader) down. Kenshin succeeds, only for the real villain, an officer in the army, to have soldiers open fire on the surrendering rebels anyway, killing several, including the leader (who had acknowledged that he'd been wrong). True to the spirit of the trope, Kenshin (a Technical Pacifist) snaps, goes Battousai, and very nearly kills the officer.
  • Amusingly, Digimon Adventure 02 uses this trope very literally: with Ken, while still the Kaiser.
    • Done again near the end, one of the Dark Seed kids kicks a kitten. And Ken was one of the Chosen watching. Ouch. Both occasions of punting are cut from the dub.
    • Actually, the moment of punting was cut. You got to see the look of contempt on the character's face and then hear That Poor Cat.
  • Fate Testarossa introduces herself to Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha by roughing up an enormous kitten for a Jewel Seed. She (Fate) gets better.
  • Mai-Otome viewers get an early glimpse of Tomoe's not-so-niceness when she slaps around her so-called friend Miya and almost makes her cry when they botch a prank involving the sale and eventual damage of Arika's Garderobe uniform, and then tries to save face by coercing Miya into making a false confession. She then took it a step further and tried to kill Arika with Miya's GEM. And that's just for starters...
  • Hiten, a Monster Of The Week from Inuyasha, comes home with a woman, and when his brother Manten tells him that he lost some jewel shards he obtained, flies into a rage and kills her for no apparent reason.
  • The very hateable Smug Snake Jonathan Glenn does that in Brain Powerd when he destroys Nelly's house with his brand-new Baronz. He had no reason to do that, he just wanted to show off his power and make Yuu suffer.
    • And let's not forget a scene a few episodes before, where Jonathan basically tells Yuu (paraphrased): "I have slept with your sister, and after that with your dear mom as well. They care about me more than they care about you! Hahahaaa!". Yeah, Johnny Boy is a bastard.
  • Despite being a hero (well, Anti Hero), Lelouch from Code Geass gets a definite Kick The Dog (or possibly even a Rape The Dog) moment when he orders the slaughter of anyone connected with the Geass as part of a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge for his close friend Shirley's murder. Since a Geass user killed her, his anger is somewhat justified, but taking it out on civilians and children is the point where it crosses into this or the other trope.
    • To be fair,those kids seem like they were being raised to use the Geass for assassinations and other such similar stuff, as evidenced by how easily some of them could kill.
      • That would be an Asshole Victim moment for those who raised the kids into tykebombs, more than for these children who simply don't know any other way to deal with violence.
      • in episode 19 he has a pet the dog made to look like a kick the dog moment when exposed and confronted by all members of the black knights with no escape , he laughs in their faces ,claim that their rebellion was nothing but a game to him and that they were all pawns, taking special care to name the only person still at his side as "the most brillient pawn" breaking her heart in the process , this is subverted a moment later when he reveals that the whole thing was an act ment to prevent her from staying and dying beside him
  • The Pretty Cure villains are pros at this.
    • In Episode 11 of the first season, after assuming his monstrous form to fight Nagisa/Cure Black and Honoka/Cure White, Gekidrago becomes so frustrated that he willingly attacks Ryota, Nagisa's little brother, just for having wandered near the scene of the battle. Terrible mistake. An enraged Cure Black declares This Is Unforgivable and attacks Gekidrago with a vengeance... and, as one might imagine, the dumb oaf does not live to see the end of the episode.
    • Femme Fatale Poisonny's tactics almost always involve some dog kicking, mainly using mind control over a group of bystanders and using them as meat shield. The brainwashing of two of Nagisa and Honoka's schoolmates in Episode 14 comes to mind.
    • In Splash Star, the very first thing Karehan (the first member of Dark Fall's Quirky Miniboss Squad) does is beat up Flappy and Choppy to force them to give up information about the Source of the Sun.
    • It seems that villains, in that series, are at their worst when they're about to be killed by the heroines. In Episode 13 of Splash Star, Moerumba destroys a glass sculptor's work in front of Saki and Mai just to prove his point that might makes right. And that was his last episode, barring his resurrection later in the series.
    • Shitataare, while a somewhat humorous villainess, seemed to try her best to get under Saki and Mai's skin by repeatedly reminding them of how Michiru and Kaoru were trapped in the darkness and forever lost. Pretty much the only villain who refrained from Kick The Dog in that season, other than Michiru and Kaoru themselves, was Kintolesky, because of his obsession with fighting fair.
    • And let's not even go into what Gooyan did...
  • Jerkass road racer Shingo from Initial D. We first witness him tapping the bumper of Iketani's car (which had just come back from being repaired after a horrible crash), and later when confronted, says that it's Iketani's own fault for being too slow. He continues his Kick The Dog moments by challenging Takumi to a match in which both drivers' non-shifting hands are taped to the steering wheel, breaks up a date between Itsuki and his blind date by crashing Itsuki's car, and during the race that he challenged Takumi to, attempts to crash Takumi's car in an attempt to end the match in a draw (since Shingo couldn't catch up anymore), and this is where his rampage ends: He misses Takumi and crashes into the guardrail instead. But this turns into a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming when Iketani and Itsuki come across Shingo and offer to take him to the hospital instead of getting mad at him.
  • In Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Marie's entire family—including her dog—are gunned down by the Neo Atlantian soldiers just because they're that mean.
  • Though she gave a warning beforehand, Shizuru's attack on a near-defenseless Yukino in Mai-HiME punctuated her Face Heel Turn.

Comic Books
  • In Alan Moore's Miracleman, the newly revived Kid Miracleman initially spares the one person that had offered kindness to his mortal alter-ego Johnny Bates, only to return moments later to viciously take the woman's head apart with a single blow, claiming that his earlier act of mercy would've been seen as a sign that the villain had "gotten soft".
  • Seen at the top of the page is Cobra Commander, in a panel taken from a GI Joe comic book. Yes, he actually went and did it.
  • In Elf Quest, the Wolfriders bond with wolves, and the Gliders with giant birds. Just before the two groups meet, Strongbow spots one of the giant birds and shoots it down for a meal. It becomes an inter-tribal incident that sticks half the tribe in slavery and Strongbow in psychic torture for a couple weeks, before the tribes' leaders meet to discuss it. One of the proposed solutions is to kill Strongbow's bond-wolf: "My mount was slain while testing its wings! Why should the killer's mount live?" One of the Wolfriders protests that they cannot order the execution of the wolf -- "You might as well command us to kill our own children!" This is a little bit remarkable in that the death was caused by the good guys out of ignorance and not malice.
    • In a much later issue, the animal-tamer elf Teir berated Ember for being willing to kill an animal who trusted her. "Would you kill the wolf who shared your fire if you needed some new furs?"
  • In issue 4 of Infinite Crisis, Superboy-Prime cemented his asshole status by kicking Krypto the Superdog. You don't tug on Superman's cape, and you certainly don't kick his dog.
  • In the Sandman issue about the serial killers convention, one of the convention attendees tells another that he got his start by cutting off the heads off of kittens.
    • Notably, the said guy was the most sympathetic person in the convention. He clearly understood he was sick, but lacked courage to turn himself in. It's implied that he was looking for peer support for just that.
    • Also in Sandman, Desire does a unique kick the dog moment that doubles as a demonstration of what a Magnificent Bastard he/she is: Desire tells a random party-goer how she can win and cruelly break another woman's heart. Apparently, he/she can figure such things out just by looking at people.
  • Not that Jody from Preacher needed any further proof of his unredeemable bastardry, but in a feat fitting for the trope, he went beyond kicking Jesse Custer's pet dog Duke when it made the mistake of humping his leg: he nailed it by the head on a fence.
    • Ironically, in their final fight, Jesse would nail Jody in the head with a piece of the fence. In both terms. The fact Jody no-sells it gives one last demonstration of how inhuman he is.
  • In a story from the 1940's newspaper comic strip of Batman, a giant thug is shown caring for a kitten. After attacking Batman and Robin when they show up (and hence causing the his boss undue suspicion) the thug's boss breaks the kitten's neck as punishment. While the crime boss ultimately ends up drowning in a swamp while his thug stands by, the revenge is soured by the crime boss being able to shoot the thug to death before he's pulled under. The whole thing made this troper wish that the daily strip featured The Punisher instead.
  • Nothing demonstrates one's evil properties quite like attempting to destroy an entire city of orphans.
  • Colonel Boris/Jorgen is generally considered Tintin's most unpopular villain. Why? He kicks Snowy down the rocket chute in Explorers on the Moon, breaking the poor thing's leg. To quote the Captain: "Monster! Vivisectionist!"
  • Doomsday has several, including crushing as small bird and beating up a little boy and his cat. To be entirely fair, though, it's not like he can help it, as he was raised to see anything and everything as a threat that must be destroyed.
  • The first appearance of the DCU villains The Reach (evil super-advanced alien race, enemies of the third Blue Beetle) has the Reach negotiator stress how they're there to 'save the earth' and that the Reach 'come in peace'. The very next page introduces the Reach Negotiator's adorable minions... and he crushes one of their heads with his bare hand. Just so the audience wouldn't believe the whole 'we come in peace' thing.

Film
  • In Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Rear Window, just when it looks like Lars Thorwald didn't actually kill his wife, another neighbor's dog gets killed. Three guesses as to who strangled the unfortunate canine? Oddly enough, Thorwald was seen petting the dog and gently shooing it away in an earlier scene.
  • In the 2007 Transformers film, Megatron gets to Kick The Human: after he and Prime fall to the ground during their climactic battle, Megatron casually flicks a fleeing passerby in disgust. This passerby, was in fact, the director, Michael Bay. This scene was actually a compromise of the original, which involved a sunroof.
  • Villains in B action movies routinely do unspeakable things like this to family, friends, and property of the hero to set him on the path to violent revenge. One of the most flagrant abuses of the trope was in the Chuck Norris film Lone Wolf McQuade. The villain (David Carradine) goes through all the usual atrocities, including killing or maiming the hero's entire family, until -- with the most dramatic music of the movie welling up -- he kills McQuade's border collie and leaves him lying in the dirt. At that point, Norris's wooden features almost show real emotion as he sets his jaw and goes forth seeking vengeance.
  • Syndrome in The Incredibles. First, he mocks Mr. Incredible for the apparent death of his family. Then, he encourages Mr. Incredible to kill his henchwoman Mirage. Mirage survives, but her respect for her boss doesn't.
  • Equilibrium has a scene where the minions of the government of Libria kill a bunch of dogs. Off-camera, but still, it demonstrates very well the extents the Knight Templar establishment will go in its attempt to "protect" humanity from their own emotions. Of course, in their belief that suppressing emotion was necessary, they probably thought it a Shoot The Dog, but it's for us audiences to decide, not them.
  • The villain of Pans Labyrinth kills a couple of hunters that he suspects are rebels, one by beating his face to a bloody pulp. It's very cringe-worthy, and basically has nothing to do with the plot beyond marking him as a huge bastard.
    • What's worse, the may not actually have been rebels. He finds the rabbits they were hunting in their pack after he shoots them, and then tells his subordinate not to wake him for such trivial matters. He may have killed them to teach his men a lesson.
    • Pretty much everything the Captain does in that movie is either kicking the dog or raping it.
  • The Jet Li movie Kiss of the Dragon has a scene where the main bad guy forcibly injects the female lead, a prostitute in his employ, with her "fix" of heroin and sends her back to work on the street after she begs him to let her daughter go so that she can get out of the business. Apart from the earlier nasty things he did (such as framing Li for killing the diplomat), this scene marks him as a bastard worthy of the very nasty death that Li gave him.
  • In Scarface, Sosa's evil is made clear by his lack of qualms about the children that will be caught in a hit's collateral damage.
  • For the first 45 minutes of The Princess Bride, it appears that Prince Humperdinck, if somewhat a hunting-loving milquetoast that Buttercup doesn't love, is more aloof and uncaring than out-and-out evil... then he tortures Wesley to death on Count Rugen's crazy sucking machine, and lies to Buttercup to make her think Wesley abandoned her.
    • The book is much more to the point on the subject - the first time we see Humperdinck, he's in his Zoo of Death, where he keeps wild animals for the express purpose of killing them when he's bored.
  • And who can forget the destruction of Alderaan by The Empire's Death Star in the original Star Wars?
  • In Ernest Goes to Jail, Ernest's Evil Twin throws Ernest's small dog into the garbage can to stop it from barking. The dog was physically uninjured, but it apparently had no way of getting out before the real Ernest came along and rescued it, a day or so later.
  • Done by a corrupt cop in American Gangster- he shoots the dog.
  • This happens in many, many Bollywood films, such as the Captain beating his servant in Lagaan.
  • In One Crazy Summer, Aquila Beckersted gloats over his victory over the protagonists and punctuates his villainy by literally kicking a little girl's dog and putting it in an animal hospital.
  • In Batman Begins, just to make good and sure that the audience is set against Detective Flass, a corrupt cop, he cheats a street vendor out of his money before Batman interrogates him.
  • Early in the movie Dog Soldiers, a Special Forces commander ironically fulfils this trope by literally shooting a dog. Not that kind of Shoot The Dog, just killing it for no real reason.
  • Don't forget Glenn Close's character from Fatal Attraction killing and cooking the pet rabbit of the protagonist's daughter.
  • In the 1970s Blaxploitation film Shaft, the title character grabs one of the Big Bad's Mooks and uses him as a human shield to try and escape. The villain shoots and kills his own henchman. He lets Shaft live only because he has to report back to his employer Bumpy that the Big Bad hasn't killed Bumpy's daughter, that he has taken hostage.
  • Snakes On A Plane has a businessman who grabs another passenger's pet chihuahua and throws it to the snakes in an attempt to buy himself some time. Everyone in the audience likely cheers when, a few seconds later, a snake eats him.
  • The Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: "Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings... and call off Christmas!"
    • This troper found this rant (and others like it) to be the most entertaining part of the character.
  • American Psycho had a very literal example. When the dog of the homeless man Patrick Bateman has just shot to death starts barking, Bateman coolly stomps it to death, shutting it up. Later, he is at an ATM when a kitten starts rubbing against his leg. He picks it up, the scene playing like an unlikely Pet The Dog (or kitty) moment... until the ATM screen reads "FEED ME A STRAY CAT," and Bateman (almost) obliges.
  • Back To The Future Part II: There's a scene in 1955 where Biff gets a hold of a bunch of kids' ball and while listening to them plead to have it back mocks them and then throws it onto a second story balcony. Not that it wasn't already obvious Biff was a jackass, but it was over the top.
  • In the movie U-571, the captain of the Nazi U-boat orders his men to slaughter survivors from an Allied cargo ship over his crew's protests.
  • In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, in order to make the Ax Crazy protagonist sympathetic, they had to show his nemesis, the judge, sentencing an eight-year-old to death.
    • This is actually a stand-in for a considerably less endearing moment in the stage version. While spying on Johanna through a hole in the wall, the judge rants to himself about how beautiful she's grown in the years he's cared for her. He gets so worked up (and naked...) in the process that he has to self-flagellate to restrain himself from raping her, while praying for his erection to go away. When that doesn't work, he throws his bathrobe back on and rushes into her room to inform her that they're getting married. Naturally, he's singing the entire time.
    • This troper believes the scene was meant to draw parallels with Signore Pirelli's rather cruel treatment of his ward Toby, especially when he is soundly bested by Sweeney at the shaving contest in the marketplace. The scene in question shows that Judge Turpin is even worse than Pirelli -- and it immediately follows the scene where Pirelli becomes Sweeney's very first victim.
    • And then there's the Judge's introduction sequence, in which he has Benjamin Barker, the man who would become Sweeney Todd, arrested and transported for life on a false charge so that he could have his wife Lucy for himself. Soon after doing this, Judge Turpin then pulls a Rape The Dog moment with the "Poor Thing" sequence where he has the Beadle lure Lucy to his place, where he has a masked ball going on underway, and then proceeds to rape her once he has her cornered and at his mercy.
    • The Beadle, in addition to his part in getting Lucy to the ball at Judge Turpin's place where the "Poor Thing" scene takes place, gets a Kick The Dog moment of his own when he kicks the crap out of poor Anthony after Turpin throws him out for "gandering" at Johanna.
    • And then there's Judge Turpin's Kick The Dog of Kick The Dogs which was having Johanna thrown into Bedlam House for defying his Hikaru Genji Plan by planning to elope with Anthony. This would very likely have resulted in Johanna going crazy herself if Anthony hadn't gotten his Big Damn Hero on and rescued her. So Yeah...Judge Turpin is an utter bastard.
  • The Joker in the first Tim Burton Batman movie had a number of examples of this, such as terrorizing Vicki Vale, disposing of his last girlfriend Alicia offscreen so he could be with her, and gassing a museum and a parade full of innocent people (though the last one was foiled by the Batman), but the worst was probably cold-bloodedly executing his unquestioningly loyal Battle Butler Bob after asking him for his gun following said foiling.
  • In Disney's version of Peter Pan, Captain Hook shoots one of his own men for singing off key. Later, when another mentions that Wendy made no splash after walking the plank (she got rescued by Peter), Hook tosses him overboard just to hear a splash.
  • In Advent Children, Kadaj kicked the dog when he convinced Rufus he needed to tell the truth by tossing Tseng and Elena's bloodstained ID cards at his feet. It would have been a much more gruesome moment if...well...
  • In the new Hulk film, Blonsky arrives at Bruce's apartment with his tranquilizer gun only to find he's already run for it; he shoots Bruce's dog instead (complete with comedy yelp noise).
    • In the screening this troper attended, many of the audience reacted in distress to the moment, some remarking aloud that a tranq dart intended to knock out a human (in fact, a human who could become the Hulk!) probably hurt the dog. Nobody found it funny, but it did cement the latent super-villain as the vilest of characters.
  • In Suicide Club, Genesis literally does this as well as two different Rape The Dog moments, all in one scene.
  • In the movie The Monster Squad, Dracula all but cements the fact that he is an utter bastard right near the end of the movie when he confronts Phoebe, a little girl who is five years old and has the amulet that he wants to destroy so that the creatures of the night can rule the world, with these words: "Give me the amulet, you BITCH!" If calling a five-year-old a bitch isn't Kicking The Dog, this troper doesn't know what is.
  • Agents Johnson and Johnson in the first Die Hard have an exchange in which they determine that their plan to stop the terrorists (which was actually a vital part of Hans Gruber's Xanatos Gambit) could end up with 25% of the hostages dead, but they dismiss it as being an acceptable casualty. Presumably this is to obliterate any sympathy one might have for the fact that they get blown up by Gruber five minutes later.
  • As far as Kane Hodder was concerned, kicking dogs is too evil even for Jason Voorhees: "Jason can pull people's limbs off and beat them to death with their own arms, things like that, but he's not gonna be kicking any dog. You know, you gotta draw the line somewhere."
  • The Sheriff of Nottingham in the Disney version of Robin Hood (who, ironically enough for a Dog Kicker, is a wolf...) goes as far as to steal money from disabled beggars, children and even from Friar Tuck's church. He does all this with an almost jovial countenance, as if he was just playing an innocent joke... and to top it off, he calls it "his job"!

Literature
  • In the original book version of The Dead Zone, the first sign we have that Stillson is evil under his affable exterior is when, after making sure the owners of a particularly annoying dog aren't home, he teargasses it and kicks it to death.
  • In the Discworld novel Small Gods, High Exquisitor Vorbis harpoons a porpoise. Not only does he intend this as a slight against what he regards as a harmless superstition, but if there was any doubt of his evil, it is gone.
    • It's worse than that -- he forces the ship's captain to do the harpooning. The captain knows better than to say no to the Exquisitor when challenged to prove he harbors no heretical superstitions, e.g., that the souls of sailors are reincarnated as porpoises.
    • Earlier in the book, Vorbis turns a tortoise on its back and props it with pebbles to ensure that it cannot right itself. The tortoise is a protagonist, but Vorbis doesn't know this at the time; he just wants to see how a tortoise dies.
    • In Hogfather, Mr. Teatime kills a dog by nailing it to the ceiling. This isn't even because he was trying to be cruel; he simply didn't want it to bark while he was working. Which just shows that he's evil and crazy.
    • In Witches Abroad, Lilith de Tempscire Lily Weatherwax, Granny Weatherwax's sister turning some drunk coach drivers into beetles and crushing them. Might qualify as a Rape The Dog moment, given it had probably been kicked fairly severely by this point. The scary part is, she thinks she's the good one.
  • In one book, the Animorphs set out to put a stop to the workings of a certain Villain With Good Publicity. Their plan resembles an Engineered Public Confession, only instead of confessing to anything, the villain was set up to have a Kick The Dog moment on live television.
    • Literally so.
  • In A Song Of Ice And Fire, as if there weren't enough evidence that Joffrey Baratheon is a psychopath, other characters relate an incident where he cuts open a pregnant cat.
    • This editor, carefully reading every chapter of A Game of Thrones that had Viserys Targaryen in it, couldn't find a single thing he said or did that wasn't either one of these or a Rape The Dog moment.
  • In The Algebraist by Ian M Banks the Archimandrite Luseferous primarily stays off-stage kicking the dog repeatedly, acting as a horrible encroaching threat we know is ready and able to bring hell if not thwarted...yet never meeting the protagonists or directly interacting with the main plot. In one scene he uses the undying severed head of an enemy as a punch-ball.
  • Maybe the cultural standard is a little different, or perhaps it's at least partly for shock value, but this editor has read a number of horror shorts (most by Takahashi Rumiko) in which the villain's first evil act is killing a dog. Sometimes eviscerating it.
    • A girl and her pregnant dog go too close to an evil place, and end up having to spend the night there (I think she got knocked out); the evil goes into the dog, destroys it and the babies, and emerges in the form of a horrible fleshless sort of puppy that the hero later has to defeat.
    • A boy in high school finds out that the girl he was betrothed to as a child is coming to see him. He scoffs at the custom, since he has a girlfriend and all. His fiancée takes it a little more seriously. She can control little shapeless monsters who eat things, and has already murdered at least two people and a dog (it barked at her, so she poisoned it to feed her new pets). Then, to frighten her fiancé's girlfriend into staying away, she kills the girlfriend's dog.
    • There's a series (this editor forget which) in which... demons? vampire spirits?... take over bodies shortly after death. One little boy dies and gets possessed this way, and his mother can't bring herself to destroy him, so she hides him. Brings him animals to kill and eat. However, despite the numerous pets who go missing and the eviscerated corpses that show up all over the place, the fact that he's killing animals and not people works against Kick The Dog, seeing as (a) the boy lives, (b) he's victim more than villain, and (c) the killing of pets was literally the lesser of two evils.
  • Let's not forget that pet standards differ by culture. Whatever is the pet norm is the one thing you would never even consider eating. For Americans, it's dogs and cats. For those in India, it's cows. We have no problem eating beef, and we joke about how Asians might serve dogs and cats in restaurants (There's a Cat in the Kettle at the Peking Moon). And, of course, some people eat horseflesh... and right now there's some little kid out there realizing that their breakfast sausage was made from Wilbur.
    • And Finns eat reindeer. Goodbye, Rudolph! We hardly knew you!
    • Standards also change with the times, notably before spaying and neutering became the norm. In Emily of New Moon, Emily is on vacation when she receives a letter saying her cat has had kittens. She matter-of-factly hopes she'll get to see them before they're drowned; her relatives only spare one. On the other hand, there are actual Kick The Dog moments in the book, when we learn that Teddy's pathologically jealous mother has drowned and poisoned various cats because she thought he loved them more than her.
  • Since Zedar in the Belgariad neither Kicked nor Raped The Dog (he only betrayed his loving God and his brothers, set off all the tragedy in the entire book and tried to destroy the world), apparently a lot of fans thought Belgarath might have been hitting the metaphorical pup himself when he decided to stick the other man in rock for all eternity. Which just goes to show, really.
    • If you read the books more carefully, you'll see that Zedar absolutely had to do a lot of the various things he did. If he hadn't then the entire sequence of events that led up to the reunification of the two purposes would never have happened and/or the Dark Prophecy would have triumphed. Add to that the idea that in reality everyone was merely a pawn of either or both of the prophecies and incapable of independent actions it's not hard to see why he retains some sympathy.
    • In the prequels however, he does get a fair range of dog molestation moments, including offering immortality to a queen for the murder of the King of Riva and his family, before letting her down as the whole army of three countries-and-a-half comes to avenge him.
  • This trope goes back to Victorian times, where in Oliver Twist Dickens had one of the two main villains (Bill Sikes) repeatedly kick his dog on numerous occasions. The dog even went down with Sikes when he accidentally killed himself.
    • In the Roman Polanski film adaption, the dog lives, thought Bill attempted to drown it because it was mentioned on his wanted poster.
  • In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, one of our first glimpses of Mr. Drawlight is a flashback to when he threw someone else's cat out a third-story window because he feared it would shed on his clothing.
  • Amazingly, Thomas Harris' most horrific (to this editor) scene does not occur in any of the Hannibal Lecter books, but in Black Sunday. As if Harris believed the reader needed further convincing this far in of just how nuts the pilot was, we get a scene in which the pilot brings a kitten to his wife as a gift, then gruesomely kills it via kitchen garbage disposal when the quarrel continues.
  • Pulp villains often indulged in this. One of The Spider's villains actually gave a puppy the plague and then hit it with a stick for good measure.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry finds a letter from his mother that indicates that the Potters had a cat when Harry was a baby. Harry briefly wonders if the cat died when Voldemort destroyed the house. An example of kicking the cat when no dog (other than Sirius?) is handy.
    • In the same novel, Voldemort is seen forcing Draco to torture people instead of doing it himself, just to watch him suffer, and almost killing an innocent muggle child, just because.
  • It was this reader's feeling that the novel Children of Men has its Villain With Good Publicity do several such moments within the last chapter, (with the implication that he's done more like them) simply to avoid any Moral Dissonance for the heroes, or risk them not having an adequate excuse to get him out of there when they'll try and build a better world.
  • This is the characterization of the Harkonnens in Dune.
  • The arrogant landowner Mr. Hazell kicks the old doctor's dog in Danny the Champion of the World, simply because he's in the way. So the doctor selects an extra-blunt needle for the man's injection.
  • In Stephen King's Dark Tower:The Waste Lands Gasher not only kidnaps Jake and takes him on a journey during which he threatens and beats him so much its virtually all one long Kick the Dog moment, but he starts the journey by instructing him to throw Oy, his newfound pet Billy-Bumbler, off a suspension bridge, and then he literally takes a kick at Oy as he runs away. Needless to say, he gets his Karmic Death as it's Oy that leads Roland to the lair of Gasher and his buddies.
  • At Super Hero School Whateley Academy in the webfiction Whateley Universe, the head of the Alphas, Don Sebastiano, is the master of this. As an example, he tells Hekate how he can handle a deviser, and demonstrates by destroying a different deviser's invention in such a way that nearby girls think the deviser was attacking them. Best part? Said deviser is known around campus to be mentally ill. What a classy guy.
  • One of the villains in Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series does this literally: he crushes the head of a puppy under his foot. He does it not even because the dog annoyed him, but because he knew it would shock the hero (who he didn't see as anyone special at that time).
  • The easiest way to figure out who the villain is in the Honor Harrington books is to see who has the most misogynistic internal monologue, with frequent use of phrases such as "that bitch" or "putting her in her place."

Professional Wrestling
  • Authority figures in Professional Wrestling often Kick The Dog by placing commentators, referees, valets, and other non-wrestlers into wrestling matches with particularly brutal heels (villains), who then proceed to demolish the hapless non-wrestler with glee. This is a sort of double-dog-kick, as it serves as a kick-the-dog moment for both the authority figure and the wrestler who does his dirty work.
    • An example of a wrestler bullying a commentator was used to kick off The Undertaker's most recent Face Heel Turn in late 2001, when The Undertaker forced Jim Ross to join Vince McMahon's Kiss My Ass club.
  • More literal, when Chris Jericho needed to make a Face Heel Turn before his WrestleMania match against HHH, he was given the responsibility of watching over HHH's dog. His negligence of the dog led to its Off Camera Death.

Stage
  • Stephen Sondheim's Assassins: Sarah Jane Moore shoots her dog for barking, then stuffs the dead dog in her purse -- but it's played for laughs.

Webcomics

Web Animation
  • Appears on Homestar Runner, in Teen Girl Squad Issue 11. So-and-So is getting chewed out by her obnoxious manager at Shirt Folding Store when the manager is suddenly punched out by an astronaut ("MEET A FIST!"). The explanation for this behavior?
    Astronaut: *ckhk* She killed my dog.
    So-and-So: Um... 'kay.
    • Also referenced in the Strong Bad Email rated, where Strong Bad claims that some of his favorite movies have been banned in Transylvania, "where you're required by law to eat puppies for breakfast."
    • Strong Bad is also known to kick The Cheat, even though he's not really a bad guy.
  • Richard kicks a dog, literally.

Live Action TV
  • As above, horror anthologies are particularly prone to this. Tales From The Crypt, Monsters, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, and so on all did it from time to time.
  • Mac Gyver was romanced by a female assassin. How were we told that she wasn't going to be charmed by his goodness and turn good? She killed a dog.
  • Likewise, the charming suitor of a friend of the family on Seventh Heaven was revealed to be a wife beater after he threatened to kill a dog.
  • In the pilot of the teen drama Hidden Palms, Cliff is revealed as being unhinged when he is shown kicking a pug.
  • In the miniseries which launched the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, Caprica Six's villainy is announced when she kills a baby seconds into her first onscreen appearance. However, in a move typical of the series' tendency to favour moral complexity over black and white morality, on her reintroduction during the second season, Caprica develops into a much more layered and sympathetic character. Despite her having not only kicked the dog but committed genocide. On the third hand, it was often theorized that Caprica had killed the baby out of either dispassionate curiosity, or even a strange desire to save the baby from its inevitable death in a nuclear holocaust.
    • To this troper it seemed like a pure accident. She was fascinated how such a frail neck could support the big head, and in the process of feeling its durability, she found out that it wasn't quite as strong as she thought.
    • In the DVD commentary, it was revealed that the scene was a strong candidate for being cut in editing--however, the actress, Tricia Helfer, had such a strong expression of ambiguous guilt and grief walking away from the site of the killing that it was kept.
  • On Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Giles' books contain an anecdote about Angelus nailing a puppy to the wall. Buffy finds such a story shocking enough that she refuses to let Giles tell her any details, saying, "I don't have a puppy. So skip it!"
    • Later, after much Badass Decay, a defanged Spike keeps his hand in the evil game by dealing black market kittens to demons.
    • In another episode (or the same one, possibly) Buffy witnesses a poker game among demons, where they use kittens instead of money. At this point, Buffy has become so jaded that she just remarks, "Why don't they just gamble with money and buy the kittens themselves?" She then gets a hold of herself and liberates the kittens.
  • In one episode of Hustle, the crew are conning a woman seeking vengeance on her ex-husband. One of the reasons they take his side is that she killed his dog.
  • Agent Dobson's hitting of an already-unconscious Shepherd Book in the Firefly pilot was a very intentional Kick The Dog moment (and is lampshaded as such in the commentary track), designed to make Mal gunning him down without a second thought later go down easier with the audience.
    • Soon fortified when he threatened to shoot Kaylee in the throat, after already almost killing her once.
    • Not to mention he spends the entire time afterward pointing a gun at the head of a traumatized, terrified River, who's on the verge of tears the whole time. And Jayne indicates Dobson knew what the Alliance had done to River, and was still intending to bring her back to the Academy so they could keep experimenting on her. So yeah, Dobson. Good luck on getting those sympathy points, man.
  • In an episode of Hercules The Legendary Journeys, Hercules goes to the underworld where he briefly unites with his wife and children who were murdered by Hera. The family dog is there too. As Kevin Sorbo says in the commentary "You can tell she's evil. She killed my dog too!"
  • The minor character of Devo Damars from the 1991 Beverly Hills, 90210 episode "Ashes To Ashes". (Quote from Television Without Pity Mondos Extra by reviewer Cleophus Wayne: Next is the slightly sad spectacle of Devo wearing a loud dress shirt and holding flowers, yogurt, and a bag of tamales while shooing away a small dog that continues to nip at his ankles. It's quite the empowering scenario for any young black man, I must say. Two of Beverly Hills' finest slowly pull up in their patrol car. "Don't you like animals?" they ask.) Which is apparently enough to get him labeled a troublemaker by the cops, because it ends up with him getting arrested for walking around without a car (gasp!) and not knowing his girlfriend's home address.
  • Subverted in the pilot episode of New Tricks, in which DS Sandra Pullman -- a central protagonist of the series, and a decent if uptight police officer -- is forced to shoot a vicious dog that is attacking her during a raid on a triad gang's headquarters. Also parodied in that although it's a reasonable and justified act given that the dog was attacking her, the resulting public outcry over the incident (with far more fuss raised than is made over a human kidnap victim who is accidentally seriously injured during the botched operation) makes her a laughing stock amongst her colleagues and is enough to completely derail her career.
  • If it wasn't any clear after just the first few minutes of Damages, Patricia "Patty" Hewes soon solidifies her reputation as a magnificent bitch by orchestrating this trope as part of a Xanatos Gambit.
  • In 24, Drazen uses a hostage to get Jack to back down, and then shoots the hostage, either just for the hell of it or to have one less person to keep up with.
  • In the fourth season of the HBO series The Wire, Marlo Stanfield brazenly walks into a convenience store and steals several small items in full view of a security guard. The guard follows him outside and asks why he would do something so foolish, leading Marlo to deliver one of his most memorable lines ("You think it's one way...but it's the other way"). He then has the guard (who took the job to support his family) murdered for questioning Marlo's actions. Later on in the fifth season, he gains the trust of "Proposition" Joe Stewart, a long-time player in the Baltimore drug trade, and supposedly makes arrangements to get him out of the country to lay low. Joe shows Marlo around his house, commenting on the history of the city. Then, Marlo reveals that he never was going to get him out of the States, and that Joe's nephew sold him out. He then has his enforcer, Chris, execute Joe while he stands watching the entire act.

Western Animation
  • Bugs Bunny and similar Looney Tunes characters usually wait until someone does this to start tormenting them.
    • Animaniacs once broke the Fourth Wall, in an episode featuring a nice but overbearing nanny who smothered the Warner Brothers and their Sister Dot. Wakko Warner almost hits her with a "funny" mallet, but then walks away dejected because he can't bring himself to do it. The story cuts to a father watching the episode with his son, and he explains this very trope.
  • Spoofed in one of the episodes of The Tick, when the heroes pretend to be villains, up to a point where they are confronted and asked to literally eat some kittens to prove they are evil. They refuse, blowing the cover.
  • In Family Guy, an evil corporate boss almost performs it literally. After saying his evil plans to instigate children to smoke out loud, he pets a dog and, seconds later, throws the dog out of the window and shoots it instead of kicking.
  • Avatar The Last Airbender:
    • Princess Azula's very first scene and her memorable exchange of dialogue with her Captain served to support what the writers had announced about her before, that unlike her brother, Azula is no sympathetic Anti Villain but a cold-blooded sociopath.
    • A more classic dog-kicking (more properly, turtle-duck kicking) scene with Azula is a flashback to her as a young girl, throwing rocks at cute innocent little turtle-ducks floating in the palace pond. Given that even as late as the season 3 premiere, the turtle-ducks were shown still fleeing in panic whenever the older Azula walked near the pond, she seems to have done this a lot.
    • Jet was also subject to a visual◊ kicking the dog (feeble old man) moment in his initial appearance.
    • When Mai was introduced, she agreed with Azula to back out of a hostage change for her own baby brother, making herself look like a cruelly Emotionless Girl who doesn't care about anything except obeying Azula because that's what she wants her to think.
  • Played straight with Pizzazz of the Misfits kicking a cat in the first version of "Take A Hike, Jack!" in the Jem episode, "Old Meets New."
  • In How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch's dog Max suffers many indignities at the Grinch's hand.
  • In The Simpsons episode "Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment", the detective Rex Banner has a kick the dog moment of sorts; he decides to test the catapult with which the town is about to fire Homer out of for violating the law with a harmless cat. This is probably to set it up so that you don't feel very sorry for him when he gets launched from the catapult a minute later.
  • Porter C. Powell of Transformers Animated at the start of season two. Sari's father is missing in action. What does he do? Steals his company and informs the poor girl that there's no papers to prove she even exists. Particularly jarring since Sari was the first human sidekick that the audience actually liked.

Video Games
  • In Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, during a briefing in the "Cold Alliance" episode, Bentley remarks that he saw bad guy General Tsao "kick a puppy, twice!" Taken less literally, Tsao also shows himself to be a misogynist when Sly confronts him about his plans to marry the Panda King's daughter in a Shotgun Wedding.
    Sly: She doesn't want to marry you!
    Tsao: She's a woman, she doesn't know up from down.
  • Tales Of Symphonia has several; all of the Desian Grand Cardials get at least one involving doing some manner of nasty stuff to an Innocent Bystander, and Mithos gets a particularly anvilicious one when he's revealed as a villain by nearly killing one of his former nakama and kicking him while he lies defenceless on the floor while laughing evilly. Colette, at one point, literally kicks the dog
  • In Snatcher, a pair of the titular Ridiculously Human Robots attempt to search Katrina's house for a list of Snatcher-run hospitals hidden there. When they fail to find it, they slaughter her dog, Alice, gut it violently, and throw it through Katrina's window, entrails hanging out. In the original Japanese, uncensored version, it's still twitching.
  • In Jak II, the Krimzon Guard -- a fascist organization led by Baron Praxis -- that holds Haven City in the grip of oppression, at least seems to have a redeeming trait in that they keep it safe from the monstrous Metal Heads. Then, partway through the game, you find out that they've been bribing the Metal Heads to make ineffectual attacks for them to thwart, rather than staying quiet until they can stage an effective assault, in order to justify their rule as necessary in face of this danger. Because, y'know, just being fascists who tortured the main character for two years didn't make them bad enough.
    • And in the first cutscene after Jak escapes prison, you get this little gem.
    Krimzon Guard: By order of his eminence, the Grand Protector of Haven City, Baron Praxis, everyone in this section is hereby under arrest for suspicion of harboring underground fugitives. Surrender and die!
    Daxter: Ahh, excuse me sir, don't you mean surrender OR die?
    Kor: Not in this city!
  • The World Ends With You. Oh, where to begin...
    • Megumi Kitanji has one the instant he introduces himself to the players, saying that Neku's entry fee is now Shiki, so instead of restoring her to life like the Reaper's Game promises, he instead sends her to a state of limbo, on pain of death if Neku loses. That in itself was a dick move, but he later blantantly abuses the rules he's supposed to uphold when he