Bad People Abuse Animals / Literature

• Agnes Grey: A recurring theme in the novel. The first family Agnes acts as governess to just seem like run-of-the-mill Upper-Class Twits whose children are Spoiled Brats... until she finds out the parents let their kids torture small animals like baby birds for fun. Years later, she realizes the local rector at a small town she's living in is not a good man because he kicks her neighbor's cat and her dog, while she realizes the pastor Mr. Weston is a truly good man because he pets those same animals instead of kicking them.
• In the American Girl series, Felicity falls in love with a horse that she names "Penny". Penny's owner is a mean old man named Jiggy Nye, who mistreats her. He's also a leather tanner, and not well respected in Williamsburg because of his cruelty to both man and beast.
• Animal Farm: One of the reasons the animals rebelled was because Mr. Jones had been treating them worse and worse as he got older. The final straw came on a day when he straight-up forgot to give them food.
• In the Arcia Chronicles, whether a person of Royal Blood gets along with the cats living in the Imperial Palace of Munt is a surefire indicator of whether he will be The Good King or a bad one. Justified in that the "cats" are actually cat-shaped guardian spirits of the palace and being accepted by them is an ancient rite of passage for future kings that the humans have long forgotten. Charles and Alexander Tagere get along with the "cats" right away, Philip Tagere has more trouble with them, while both Pierres Lumen can't stand them (mutually), which perfectly mirrors the scale of how virtuous they are presented by the narration.
• The Berenstain Bears: In "The Bully", Sister is beaten up at school by a girl named Tuffy. Brother teaches her self-defense which he advises her to use only as a last resort. Sister catches Tuffy throwing stones at a baby bird, an event that is captured in italicized text in the book. Sister calls Tuffy out on it, and the subsequent fight ends with Sister punching Tuffy in the nose.
• Blood Meridian:
  • At one point the gang the Villain Protagonist joins is visited by an arms dealer who hands The Leader John Glanton a revolver. Glanton immediately tests it out by shooting nearby livestock and a cat, then proceeds to haggle over the price like nothing happened. It's ultimately Zig-Zagged, since soon after this Glanton adopts a dog that he seemingly cares for more than other people, but it's implied that only because it was something he could control that belonged to him rather than out of any sort of compassion.
  • The Big Bad Judge Holden buys two puppies from a young boy simply so he could throw them off the bridge into the river below. One of his Psycho for Hire associates shoots them as they're drowning, and it's unclear whether this was a Mercy Kill or done out of malice.
• The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness: In the prehistoric world, it's an everyday activity to hunt for food, but the prey is respected through proper homages to set their souls to rest and by using what's not eaten in toolmaking. There are also reserves in hunting predators. The main villains, the Soul Eaters, violate these rites by hunting down predators, killing them for certain body parts to be used in their spells, and leaving the rest to rot. In addition to that, the Crippled Wanderer begins the first book's plot by trapping a demon in a bear's body, and by the time of the last book, Eostra has corrupted a pack of dogs as her bloodthirsty minions. Thiazzi in particular takes pleasure in torturing predators that are caught and unable to fight back. The only Soul Eater who doesn't like needless animal cruelty is Nef who also performs a Heel–Face Turn.
• A few Mary Higgins Clark villains are cruel to animals:
  • In A Cry in the Night, Erich shoots Joe's puppy, who had gotten loose and was running around the property. He claims it was because he thought it was a stray and might hurt his stepchildren Beth and Tina, but his wife Jenny isn't completely convinced and it's implied he actually did it because the puppy trampled some of the flowers on his mother Caroline's grave. It's implied that he was involved in the disappearance of Joe's other dog, which also had a habit of escaping onto Krueger land. He also poisons his horse Baron to drive him mad, then blames it on Joe and Jenny.
  • Nighttime Is My Time: When the Owl attacks a random woman named Helen Whelan, her German Shepherd Brutus attacks him to protect her, prompting the Owl to savagely beat the dog. Brutus' injuries are severe enough that a vet has to put him down. Brutus proves to be the Owl's downfall in the end, due to the bite wounds he inflicted.
• The Dark: An ethereal concentration of darkness rouses people to acts of acts of murderous sadism - targets of which include animals.
• The prologue of The Dead Zone depicts a teenage Greg Stillson literally kicking a dog to death.
• In Discworld: Snuff Sir Sam Vimes, Commander of the Ankh-Morpork Watch, regales an inexperienced but eager village constable, Feeney, with how a man had once cut off his dog's back legs when it wouldn't heel. Lord Vetinari ordered the man's house searched by the Watch, and he was executed a week later for what they found in his cellar.
  Vimes: And bloody Vetinari got away with it again, because he was right: where there are little crimes, large crimes are not far behind.
• The titular doctor of Dr. Franklin's Island has been performing unethical experiments on animals for some time, implanting them with human DNA that expresses in strange, random ways, such as parrots having fleshy growths resembling limp hands and which they tear at with their beaks. No matter how warped a subject becomes, Dr. Franklin refuses to euthanize them and displays the more stable ones in a Menagerie of Misery. Naturally, when some teens are shipwrecked off the coast of his island, they're in for becoming subjects themselves. One of those girls notices how Faux Affably Evil he is - he plays like he believes she's a person, but she can see that all the while he thinks of her as an animal, and he regards animals as just something to take apart and build differently.
• In Ender's Game, Ender's sadistic older brother Peter mutilates squirrels in the woods near the family home. This is something of a subversion though since even though Peter is clearly a sadist and Ender is more compassionate, by the end of the book Ender (unwittingly) commits genocide, while Peter (selfishly) brings about world peace.
• In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fall of Gondolin, it is mentioned that Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, used to hunt, chain and torture eagles; and he then cut their wings off to figure out how to build flying gear for himself. Thorondor, the Lord of Eagles really hates him because of it.
• Go to Sleep (A Jeff the Killer Rewrite): According to the senior student's warnings, it is rumored that Randy kills animals just for the fun of it. Per Word of God here, that is one of the few rumors about Randy that is actually true.
• Graceling Realm: King Leck of Monsea, a sadistic murderer who enjoys torturing people, started on animals first. He's even shown doing this in the prequel, Fire.
• In The Grace Year, there's mean girl Kiersten Jenkins and Tommy Pearson. Tierney once witnessed Kiersten "drown a butterfly while playing with its wings". Tommy is described as the "boy who tortures majestic birds for fun?"
• In Grass and Sky, Timmi and Rebecca see three drunks camping illegally on Blueberry Island chase a moose across the lake in their motorboat. Timmi and Rebecca yell at the men to stop, but they just laugh until Grampy cuts them off in his boat. Later, Grampy tells the girls a story about the men chasing a deer in their car until it had a heart attack and died.
• Hannibal Lecter: When Mason Verger was a child, he accompanied his father to a swine fair, where the elder Verger stuck a child's 4-H pig and then had the kid's father beaten up by his thugs when he furiously confronted him.
• In The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School, supervillain-in-training Miss Steps demonstrates her sadism by pinning the protagonist between 'slabs' of telekinetic force, then boasting about how she's used this technique to squeeze live rabbits to death. The Fire/Ice Duo Thorn and Frost, who also grow up to be supervillains, are revealed to have respectively burned a cat and frozen a dog to death.
• The Howling (1977):
  • Max Quist, a sociopathic Serial Rapist, kicks Lady the dog when she bites him, trying to protect her owner Karyn from him.
  • Something in the woods surrounding Drago kills Lady, with Karyn finding what's left of her. It's initially thought to be a wild animal, but Karyn later realises it was a werewolf; as werewolves are established to retain their sapience and some degree of control after transforming, it likely killed Lady just for the hell of it.
• Ward's father in Hurog, along with being violently abusive to his children and the castle slave, mistreats his warhorse to the point where it becomes dangerous and vicious. Eventually the horse gets revenge by bucking him off and killing him on a hunting trip.
• I Am Not a Serial Killer: When John Cleaver was eight, he caught and vivisected a gopher out of idle curiosity. It was this deed, or more accurately the fact that he did it without it occurring to him until afterwards that it might be inappropriate or disturbing, that first caused him to realize that he wasn't like normal people. In the modern day, one of his self-imposed rules is that he will not interact with animals in any fashion unless absolutely necessary, to the point that he'll cross the street to avoid getting near someone's dog.
• Doctor Moreau in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau uses vivisection on animals in order to deform and mutate their bodies making them more human-like. This was no casual, as Wells (himself an animal rights activist) wrote the book as a protest against the practice of vivisection that was still practiced (though near to being outlawed) in Britain at the time.
• Young sociopath Patrick Hockstetter in IT cemented his evil cred by murdering his own baby brother as a small child, and making a game of torturing animals by locking them in an abandoned fridge to slowly starve to death. His gruesome fate at IT's hands is terrifying, but not the least bit tragic.
• In the Kenzie and Gennaro Series this trope is used in Prayers for Rain when the Big Bad kills a dog For the Evulz and specifically goes out of his way to do so. In real life, author Dennis Lehane is a well-known dog lover.
• In The Manchurian Candidate, Mrs. Iselin makes a passing remark in her narration about how she once nailed the paws of her cocker spaniel to the floor because he wouldn't obey a "heel" command. This was just one of multiple pieces of Troubling Unchildlike Behavior she displayed and an early sign of her Control Freak nature, and her older brother is specifically noted as having seen this and been disturbed by it.
• Misery: While she was in college, Annie poisoned a cat so she could use put its corpse on the stairs for her roommate to trip over.
• In A Night in the Lonesome October, the character who attempts to poison Snuff the dog and the character who attempts to drown Greymalk the cat in a well are both later revealed to be on the villainous side. The main villain hunts Needle the bat with a crossbow and tries to get Snuff done in by vivisectionists. The vivisectionists themselves are depicted as gleefully cruel people.
• The Hundred and One Dalmatians: Not only does Cruella De Vil love furs and plan to turn a large number of puppies into coats, she also mistreats her own cat and drowns all the kittens said cat has given birth to. This ends up biting her in the ass when said cat sides with the much kinder heroes and helps them to financially ruin Cruella as payback.
• In Perfect the Pig, a piglet wishes he had wings, and when his wish is granted he flies away from his farm, and the girl that finds him adopts him as her pet, plays with him, allows him to fly in open spaces, and feeds him well. The man who stole Perfect, uses him as a sideshow attraction to earn money, chains him down and locks him in a small room, and feeds him garbage. At the end when Perfect is reunited with the girl, they have a happy ending with Perfect flying above her.
• The titular Nova from S.J. Bryant's The Nova Chronicles, although a protagonist, cannot abide by insects or creatures on her ship or even in her way, often going out of her way just to trod on any animal she sees. She does admit to taking pleasure whenever she feels a skull breaking apart beneath her thick-soled combat boots (be it human or critter).
• Mack, the human running the circus-mall in The One and Only Ivan, isn't without sympathetic aspects and cares to some extent about the janitor and the janitor's daughter who've stuck with him so long. He just also absolutely doesn't care about the welfare of the animals he keeps. He bought Ivan, a baby gorilla, from poachers and raised him in his house like a child until he got too big and strong to be managed, then put Ivan alone in a small glass-walled enclosure in the mall for twenty-seven years. (The poachers who killed Ivan's family are only discussed in the past tense and are simply monstrous.) Instead of getting the older, injured elephant Stella medical care Mack bought a new baby elephant to try and attract more revenue, and threatened her with a "claw-stick" to get her to perform. In Mack's final scene in the book, he's lost the fight to keep his circus animals and any attraction they had to customers, and drunkenly doesn't comprehend that he'd ever done anything bad.
• The main characters from The Plague Dogs were experimented on at the beginning of the book, with one of them being repeatedly drowned and then resuscitated. The Animated Adaptation made it especially hard to watch…
• Ratburger has Burt who makes rats into burgers and cockroaches into "ketchup" and Sheila who killed the protagonist's hamster.
• In Red Dragon, the Tooth Fairy killer's pattern involves killing a family's pet before killing the rest of the family.
  • It's also mentioned that Hannibal Lecter had a record of childhood cruelty to animals.
• In Reflections of Eterna by the same author, one of the first things we see Richard Oakdell do is try to kill a rat with the local equivalent of the Bible for no reason other than it annoyed him. Word of God is that this either served as his Start of Darkness or was an early indication of his moral flaws that blossom in later books.
• In the novelization of Return of the Jedi, Moff Jerjerrod of the greatest Imperial battle-station ever mostly-built, gets a few pages of characterization near the end... where (other Expanded Universe materials have actually made him sympathetic) facing defeat, he realizes he hates the Rebellion, when he had once "loved" it as a helpless young boy to bully or "an enraged baby animal" he could "torture".
• George R. R. Martin's short story Sandkings introduces its protagonist by showing what he does to look after his pets when he goes on a trip. The carrion hawk already feeds itself, so absolutely nothing; the shambler (an undescribed alien animal) is pushed outside to find food on its own; and for the piranhas, he chucks a giant hunk of meat in the tank and figures that if it runs out they can eat each other. He gets back later than planned to discover his piranhas all starved and the shambler ate the hawk, so irritated but not remorseful he goes to find new exotic pets to replace them. His competence as a pet owner doesn't improve from there and is responsible for almost everything that goes wrong.
• Secrets Not Meant to be Kept has Martha Plunkett and her staff at Treehouse, a preschool that is actually a toddler sex ring. Having previously assigned the kids rabbits to care for, to get them to go along with their molestation, Plunkett eventually kills the rabbits in front of the kids to terrorize them into keeping silent about the molestation.
• The Sherlock Holmes short story "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" has Holmes being hired by Violet Hunter to investigate her employers the Rucastle family. She notes that Mr Rucastle keeps a starved mastiff on his property which is only let out at night to savage potential intruders, that he is particularly proud of his son's skill for squashing cockroaches, and that the son has a penchant for trapping and torturing small birds and mammals. Holmes takes this as evidence of the Rucastles' malicious nature, noting that streaks of cruelty are commonly passed from parent to child.
• The titular young beagle in Shiloh routinely flees his abusive owner Judd Travers, and seeks out neighbor Marty Preston, because Marty doesn't batter, cage, and starve the dog.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, Joffrey Baratheon is one the cruelest, most sadistic characters in the story. It's mentioned that when he was younger, he cut up a pregnant cat. His father was horrified and hit him hard enough to break his jaw and knock out half his baby teeth, causing Stannis, who is not the slightest bit squeamish or capable of overreacting, to seriously believe for a moment that he had killed Joffrey, though his mother didn't find it disturbing at all and dismissed it as "some nonsense with a cat" (which makes sense considering she's almost as awful as he is). In stark contrast, his younger brother Tommen is a sweet kid who adores his three pet kittens and used to have a pet fawn until Joffery made it into a pair of gloves. It's also worth noting that early in the first book, Joffrey suggests killing Bran Stark's direwolf and takes pleasure from the fact that Sansa's direwolf was put to death.
• The Space Trilogy:
  • In Perelandra, the Un-Man, when not tempting the Venusian Eve or irritating Ransom, will mangle as many critters as it can find and leave them to suffer and die. It is so expert at this that Ransom's attempt to put a frog thus abused out of its misery backfires.
  • And Invoked by the Belbury faction in That Hideous Strength, which has its outer-circle minions vivisect animals to harden their hearts in preparation for visiting similar abuses on humans in the future.
• Throughout Stray, the stray cat Pufftail tells his grandson Kitchener why he doesn't trust humans and why he prefers to be alone. He's had many bad experiences with humans in the past:
  • Pufftail's second owners only took him in because Pufftail, then called "Fluffie", and his brother Bootsie had belonged to the wife's elderly mother. Their owners had an Awful Wedded Life and often yelled at each other (and their daughter) a lot. Neither liked cats much, especially the husband. They would often forget to feed the cats all day and routinely neglected the brothers. After Bootsie killed their pet budgie, they began hitting and kicking their cats.
  • When Fluffie and Bootsie's owners went on vacation, they left their adult daughter to take care of their cats. The daughter and her boyfriend forgot to come over for over a day. The daughter wasn't so bad, but her boyfriend was. While drunk, he and a friend decided to get rid of Fluffie and Bootsie. They stuffed the cats into bags and threw them out of a moving vehicle. Bootsie didn't survive the incident.
  • Cruel scientists test cigarettes and cosmetic protects on various animals. The one "nice" scientist quits because he hates his job; he would have been fine testing for a just cause but doesn't understand testing lipstick on cats.
• Survivor Dogs:
  • The Fierce Dogs have a morning exercise ritual where they take turns chasing and pinning down a scared rabbit, before killing it. Lucky finds this behavior to be torture and compares them to sharpclaws.
  • The Fierce Dogs killed a fox kit named "Cub Fire". When his family found out they decided to get revenge, but mistook the Wild Pack for killing their cub.
  • According to Arrow, the men at the "Dog-Garden" where the Dobermann's come from rigorously trained the dogs. They'd strike the dogs (even pups) if they didn't perform correctly. This might explain why the Fierce Dogs are almost all vicious Angry Guard Dogs.
  • Lucky was a happy Leashed Dog pup until he was adopted by an abusive, alcoholic owner. Lucky ran away from that home and has been turned off from humans ever since. Just the thought of wearing a collar upsets him.
• Inverted in the short story The Theory And The Hound by O. Henry. A sheriff comes to a South American colony seeking a fugitive, a man who beat his wife to death. It's impossible to tell who of the two possible expats it might be, but he solves the problem by impulsively kicking a dog and subsequently arresting the man who jumps up and passionately harangues him.
  I'm a Kentuckian, and I've seen a great deal of both men and animals. And I never yet saw a man that was over-fond of horses and dogs but what was cruel to women.
• The Twits: The titular antagonists not only casually shoot birds while they're helplessly glued to trees, but also torture their monkey pets by forcing them to stand on their heads for hours.
• Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke: The point where Zoe crosses the Moral Event Horizon is where she commands Agnes to find a salamander in the park and smash it with a rock.
• Tortall Universe: In Mastiff, Beka Cooper finds the best scent hound in the city in the hands of a cruel trainer, and she is underfed and constantly whipped to make her obey faster. She confronts the trainer about it and becomes the dog's caretaker herself. Also has an inverted example, as Beka is somewhat dismayed to find out that crime lord Pearl Skinner is a dog lover since it will make it harder to bring her down.
• Touching Spirit Bear: Discussed. During a conversation between Cole and Garvey, Garvey asks Cole what he'd do if he saw an animal at a nearby stream. Cole says he'd kill it.
• Les Voyageurs Sans Souci: The heroes and good-aligned people treat animals respectfully and would never think to harm them. Bad people and jerkasses hunt and hurt birds for fun, causing their queen to hate humans, and are responsible for the mess which must be fixed by the protagonists: Golden Eagle is captured by one poacher and sold to one cruel ringmaster, who proceeds to cage her for display, and the queen of the birds decides to punish humans in retaliation for her best friend's disappearance.
• In Warrior Cats, there is a Twoleg living near SkyClan who is cruel to his pets. In Firestar's Quest, Petal and her kits have to be rescued from him, and in SkyClan's Destiny, the perpetually nervous Shrewtooth reveals that he is so jumpy because he used to be owned by the same man. SkyClan attacks the man to try to teach him not to mistreat any more of his pets.

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