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I'm getting five hundred phone calls a day asking what the hell is going on, that our police force is brutalizing women and misplacing children. Christ, all this picture needs now is for someone to kick a puppy for the cameras.
—Mayor Cryer, Changeling
Kicking the Dog is the fodder of anything resembling a modern-day Morality Play. A character performs an act so casual and immoral that you know that they are 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, whether they actually get their just desserts or not. While not all villains kick the dog, dog kicking is a sure sign that the writers want the audience to be wary of this character, even if he is nominally one of the good guys.
The key to this trope is that not only is the act evil, it's also pretty pointless to the actual plot. It establishes the character's morality, which is a useful endeavor, but the actual act itself is rarely important. It is the fact that it had no other point than to be evil, thus putting them on the bad side of the Rule Of Empathy.
It doesn't have to be a literal dog-kicking. 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 Nakama or Protectorate. A Politically Incorrect Villain can kick the dog by showing gratuitous racism, sexism, homophobia, etc... or some combination of such non-PC traits.
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 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. 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. At the very least, it is designed to let you know who is going to lose at the end. The opposite of Karma Houdini.
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.
One possible origin of the trope name comes from Westerns, where three bandits would ride into the town, one would shoot the Sheriff, one would shoot the Deputy, and one, just to prove he is also evil, would Kick The Dog.
If a character's Kick The Dog moment is excessively horrible, cruel, or otherwise despicable enough to make an audience lose all sympathy for him, then he's crossed the Moral Event Horizon, if he's not on the other side of it already. If the Dog in question is someone the character cares about and discovers Being Evil Sucks, then they've Kicked The Wrong Dog and might be in time to avoid a Face Heel Turn. If the dog belonged to a minion, expect it to help cause a Mook Face Turn because Even Mooks Have Loved Ones. On occasions, if karma works in the dog's favor, he'll manage to get a last laugh. On even rarer occasions, after being pushed around too many times, the dog may decide to plan against the Big Bad for his own ambitions, because Being Tortured Makes You Evil.
A more benign, and more comedic, form of this shows the immorality of the villain by having them cheat at Solitaire.
Compare with Cant Get Away With Nuthin, And Your Little Dog Too, Kick Them While They Are Down, The Dog Bites Back, Threw My Bike On The Roof, I Will Punish Your Friend For Your Failure. See " If Youre So Evil Eat This Kitten" for when bad guys do a Kick The Dog test to make sure undercover heroes are really evil.
Contrast Pet The Dog (proving you're good) and Adopt The Dog (going from Neutral to Good).
Not to be confused with Shoot The Dog. (That's what you do when Old Yeller gets rabies.)
See Kick The Son Of A Bitch for when it's less of a dog and more of a, well, you know.
No Real Life examples, please.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Naruto: Hyuuga Neji's No Holds Barred Beatdown of Hinata in the Chunin exams shows just how much of an asshole he really is. Also an example of Revenge By Proxy since she didn't do anything to deserve it.
- Just about every villain in Fist Of The North Star engages in kicking the dog in some form. Bad guys who go too far with such in Kenshiro's presence usually wind up dead by head or full body explosion courtesy of the Hokuto Shinken.
- In one of the early episodes of the anime, one of Diamond's men forces a villager to shoot a can off the head of his little boy with a bow a la William Tell. When the father can't go through with it, the scumbag takes it upon himself to "help" him, taking hold of the bow and arrow in a Hands On Approach fashion, but deliberately shaking up the poor guy's aim just to be a sadistic asshole. When the arrow finally does get launched, Kenshiro intervenes before the arrow can go into the boy's head, then dispatches the mook for his cruelty before confronting Diamond, who gets the response of "I don't give my name to monsters," when he demands Kenshiro's name.
- And as Kick The Dog-tastic as that scene was, the scene it replaced in the manga was even worse. You know that scene from Once Upon A Time In The West where Frank forces the young Harmonica to "keep his lovin' brother happy?" Diamond himself forces a little village girl to do this for her father. Fortunately, Kenshiro is there to save them both. Buronson, the main author of the series, got his pen name from Charles Bronson, who he is a big fan of, and doubtless got the idea for the scene from that movie.
- Souther pretty much is this trope. He kidnaps children, forcing them to work on his massive pyramid, and poisons a supply of bread knowing that it will be stolen from him, just to serve as a warning. On top of this he kills the nicest guy in the series in an unimaginably cruel way, an act that infuriates Kenshiro to the point of telling him that "when I'm done with you, there will be nothing left!"
- Kaioh, on the other hand, takes this trope rather literally. In a flashback we see him decide to start being evil and then, as his first evil act... you guessed it. Oddly enough this is meant to be a serious scene. Of course he also plays this trope very straight in a variety of other ways...
- In another literal example, a soldier of God's Army kicks Lin's puppy.
- Young Jagi attempts to stomp a puppy in Yuria's den.
- Kaiser Ryo 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 Episode 95. His brother Sho challenged him to a duel, so Ryo made them both wear shock bands on their wrists that would electrocute them when they took damage. He then spent the duel taking pleasure in watching Sho writhe in pain from the shocks, and almost kills him in the end. Let's repeat that - he did this to his own little brother!
- To drive the point home, Jack Atlas of Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds kidnapped a mutual friend, tied him up and put him in a rowboat placed in the sea during a violent storm in order to force Yuusei to choose between his SDD card or their friend's life.
- 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, Nanami Kiryuu is established early on as a deceptive and manipulative bully. 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 shown in a 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. Nanami 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 Nanami who gave Touga 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 Zero No Tsukaima Louise, despite being the heroine, regularly kicks the dog. Only for "kicks" substitute "beats with a riding crop" and for "dog" substitute "Saito" who she treats as her dog (despite being her love interest). In the novels it does at least once genuinely cross over into Dude Not Funny, to the extent where it almost makes Louise look like a sociopath.
- 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. Which, given that it was quite obviously terrified of her, might actually count as a Pet The Dog instead.
- The scenes manage to be even more shocking when you take into account the fact that both of these dogs are drawn as little more than small puppies.
- 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. Then later, he sets the dog in the incinerator and tricks the butler into to burning the dog to death. What an asshole.
- 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.
- It should be noted that Vanilla Ice's primary method of dealing with his enemies was a dimension-hopping Stand that could turn into a void and "eat" whatever it touched. Death by this method would generally be instantaneous, unless Ice was toying with his victim. Instead, he decided to handle it personally — a sign that he was pissed off.
- In an episode of Golion, One of Prince Sincline's slave women accidently spills some wine on his lap, he responds by taking out his Laser Blade and killing her on the spot. Obviously this scene could not be portrayed in a kids cartoon in America so it was cut of Voltron.
- Happens with cats in the manga of Sailor Moon, when Luna, Artemis and Diana are wounded by Sailor Tin Nyanko and turn into ordinary, non-talking cats. To make matters worse, one of Galaxia's minions, Sailor Lethe, kills them in the next chapter.
- And kills them by tearing their bodies apart, no less. It happened to the other Senshi, but there was something incredibly creepy and upsetting about seeing it happen to cats.
- Paul tops the list as being the biggest Jerkass in the Pokemon anime by releasing Pokemon that lose battles. In his first appearance, he captured three Starly and kept the one that knew Aerial Ace...and later, despite the fact that it won against Ash's Starly, released that one as well (in the same episode, no less)!
- Team Rocket is prone to doing this as well.
- In one episode, Jessie's hair is bitten off by a Seviper. She takes the libery of beating it to a pulp (with her bare hands, no less) before her allies convince her to capture it instead.
- In an episode where Ash's Chikorita evolves into Bayleef in Johto, they having Weezing and Arbok beat him up because Chikorita was the only Pokemon he had with him at the time, and she'd gotten captured. Another instance where they did this was in Odd Pokemon Out!, where Ash's Grovyle evolves into Sceptile to rescue a Meganium he had a crush on...then found out that he couldn't use moves due to being heartbroken because the Meganium was the significant other of the Tropius Grovyle had been fighting that episode. Team Rocket seizes this opportunity, beating up Sceptile with Cacnea and Seviper, while calling Sceptile a wimp. Sceptile broke out of this Heroic BSOD two episodes later, but it was still a really big dick move.
- And how did he break out of said BSOD? Because when Ash tried to yet again prevent Pikachu from being kidnapped by the Rockets and was hanging on from their trademark balloon... they sent out their Pokemon to attack him. You heard it right: they send said Pokemons to openly attack a human boy who's completely helpless by that moment, and who could've been killed by falling off such heights. If not for Grovyle going Papa Wolf, Ash would've most likely not survived said deal.
- 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. He also kicks his Digimon, Wormmon, on numerous occasions.
- Done again near the end, where one of the Dark Seed kids kicks a kitten. Likely a direct parallel of Ken's dog kicking. Both occasions of punting are cut from the dub.
- Digimon Tamers has an example of this when Beelzemon does this to Kyuubimon; a 9-tailed fox digimon. Made even worse by the fact that Kyuubimon was already wounded and couldn't defend herself.
- 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 Taking The Heat for the whole thing. 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 failed to collect some jewel shards he discovered, flies into a rage and kills her for no apparent reason. Very gruesomely, too: in the manga he punches a hole through her head, and in the anime, he uses a blast of lightning to fry her to a charred husk.
- 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 jerk.
- Despite being a hero (well, Anti Hero), Lelouch from Code Geass gets a definite Kick 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.
- Horrifyingly enough, the Fan Dumb doesn't seem to get it and call it a Crowningmoment Of Awesome, while bashing the ones on the receiving end. In their opinion, it's a-okay to bloodily kill kids and civilians when Lulu does it.
- Now hold on, let's tell the whole story here. Said children were already all professional killers and said civilians were scientists who experimented on said children in order to make them professional killers to begin with. They were hardly innocent people.
- The Pretty Cure villains are pros at this.
- In Episode 11 of Futari Wa Pretty Cure, 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 shields. 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 punting the pup in that season, other than Michiru and Kaoru themselves, was Kintolesky, because of his obsession with fighting fair.
- 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, little Marie's entire family (including her dog) are gunned down by the Neo Atlantian soldiers just because they're that mean.
- Shizuru's attack on a near-defenseless Yukino (which resulted in Haruka's death) in Mai-HiME punctuated her Face Heel Turn.
- In Saint Seiya, Aquarius Camus is quite a Knight Templar, and we get to see that clearly when he uses his power to singlehandedly sink a frozen ship... which was the sort-of tomb of Natasha, the mother of Camus's disciple Hyoga. To be fair, Hyoga did need to outgrow his Oedipus complex, but daaaaaamn.
- Creepy Twins Thanatos and Hypnos are much worse, as they repeteadly try to kill Seiya's amnesiac Waif Prophet sister Serika just because she's there. Thank Athena that Jabu is there and helps the girl out.
- Cancer Deathmask actually introduces himself by kicking puppies, as he throws a blind Shiryu down the Rozan cascade because he tried to defend his Old Master Dohko.
- In Yakitate Japan, we see just how rotten Tsukino's stepsister Yukino is in a flashback, where Yukino throws the ashes of Tsukino's late mother onto a tree while laughing like a maniac. A very jarring moment for a comedy about bread-making, especially since it's all but forgotten after that scene.
- One Piece has a literal version of this. Before we even get a look at her face, the very first thing "Pirate Empress" Boa Hancock does is kick a kitten◊ that simply happened to be in her path.
- Hancock is absolutely smitten with this trope. In the very next chapter she destroys a clay statue of her that the tribe's children worked on, claiming that it ruined the aesthetics, before proceeding to toss the tribe's elder through a window, and if that wasn't enough, in the next chapter she petrifies three of Luffy's newfound allies when they try to reason with her. Luckily for the side of good, that just happens to be one of Luffy's Berserk Buttons...
- She's at it again, a few chapters later she comes across a puppy and a baby seal... guess what happens. What makes this particularly notable is this is after her Heel Face Turn, although technically, almost none of the Kuja even suspect she went through a Heel Face Turn and oddly, almost none of them were aware she was cruel to them in the first place.
- Earlier in One Piece, there was an even more literal version of this when minor villain Mohji the Lion Tamer kicked an Angry Guard Dog in his path. He then proceeded to cross the Moral Event Horizon by taking the only thing the dog cared about (a pet shop once owned by his deceased master) and burned it to the ground right in front of him.
- During the Buster Call in Enies Lobby, we are briefly shown a Marine captain so ruthless his immediate response to a subordinate hesitating to fire on a base full of their own men, is to shoot this officer in the face.
- Also subverted quite cleverly at the start of the Loguetown arc. When we first meet new villain Smoker, he is walking down the street looking generally sinister. A little girl running around with an ice cream cone accidentally bumps into him and ruins his marine uniform by getting chocolate all over his pants. Smoker gives the girl an intense, hard look....and then sweetly apologizes for bumping into her. He even gives her money to buy a new cone. Especially effective since up to this point, all the villains in One Piece had been irredeemable bastards; Smoker is the first antagonist with real moral complexity to him.
- Crocodile should definitely be in this as well. He attempted to blow up the entire Alabasta Kingdom with a huge bomb which will kill off EVERYONE, including his own Baroque Works men. Even the straw hat crew are disgusted upon hearing this news. Later he attacked his partner Robin because he has no more use for her and does not trust anyone. Now thats extreme.
- Why is no one mentioning Akainu? The bastard attacked his own fellow man for refusing to participate in battle against the White Beard pirates, and even nearly killed Coby for the same reasons as well.
- We all know how the titular character from Suzumiya Haruhi loves to mistreat, molest and abuse the closest thing to a female friend she has, Mikuru. Naturally, this is played for laughs, but in the 2nd novel, there is a definite scene that crosses the line: During the filming of the Brigade's movie "The Adventures Of Mikuru Asahina", Haruhi (with the help of Genki Girl Tsuruya) first puts tequila into Mikuru's drink, so she would act more realistic for the kissing scene. The next thing she does is to punch Mikuru on the head simply because she still wore her colored contact lens. She then continues to punch her several times because the "contact lens is supposed to fly out when your head gets smacked." After Kyon understandably yells at her that Mikuru is not her toy, she seriously replies "Well I've decided, Mikuru-chan is my toy!". This actually makes Kyon explode, trying to punch her, but he is stopped by Koizumi. After Haruhi realizes what Kyon was about to do, she still doesn't get it, confronting him even more. This also shows just what a Jerkass she can be... though soon she starts to get better.
- This is softened in the anime adaptation, where Haruhi does declare the same thing... but when Kyon is about to hit her for making Mikuru cry and Itsuki stops him, she does seem to get that she was wrong, staring away and looking remorseful (if not about to cry). And not to mention Kyon, thanks to Itsuki, realizes that it's not in him to be physically violent.
- In 'Disappearance, Kyon threatens the IDSE with complete destruction should they kill Yuki by provoking Haruhi. Wisely, they step down. So what could be worse than killing Yuki? That's right! A Fate Worse Than Death! They elect her in Book 10 to be the ambassador to the Sky Canopy Domain; exposing her existence and sanity to something which is as alien to her as the Data Overmind is to humans. A lesser being would go mad from the revelation. Kyon isn't going to be happy if Yuki doesn't wake up from her naps.
- Let's not even get into the first scene with the computer club...
- In Gundam 00 the Federation military unit A-Laws is established as pretty mean when they arrest an innocent Saji Crossroad for hanging out with a suspected rebel, who they both shoot and beat up for trying to run away. Saji gets sent to what appears a penal colony created solely to make the inmates' lives a living hell, and then the A-Laws test their brand spanking-new killbots by letting them run amok in the colony. And then they get a Kill Sat... The first time it is used, a refugee camp gets destroyed. It gets worse from there...
- The oft-cited "Nena attacks a wedding out of frustration/boredom" incident also counts, since her character was established one episode earlier as a playful yet mentally unstable child soldier (her older brothers are much less on the "playful" side... especially Michael). Your Mileage May Vary as most of the people see it as a Moral Event Horizon, especially after she ditched her chance of redemption and in her moment of betraying Wang, she also killed her brother Hong Long for no reason (even if it's for self-defense, Nena would've shot him even if he didn't snap back), who is at least still more sympathetic than Liu Mei.
- In one episode of Fushigi Yuugi, while talking with underlings, Nakago takes a canary out of its cage and crushes it in his hands, just for the heck of it.
- And there's also his role in Suboshi's Moral Event Horizon crossing, in which he clearly knows how disturbed the guy is upon thinking hsi brother is dead, and he encourages him to "take revenge"...
- Now And Then Here And There plays this literally. Except it's a cat. And it's not kicked, it has its neck snapped when Hamdo has a tantrum.
- In the end credits for "Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~", main character (and assassin) Zwei is depicted repeatedly shooting a target's sad-eyed dog after he's killed her. One assumes we're meant to take this to mean that he's edgy and dangerous in his brainwashed and confused assassin persona.
- In Eyeshield 21, pretty much anything that Agon does. Highlights include: taking Kurita's spot at Shinryuuji just to spite Hiruma, perving on, accosting and nearly assaulting Mamori, nearly taking Sena's eye out at the tournament drawing, beating up the sympathetic Zokugaku Chameleons, intentionally dislocating the rather puppy-like Mizumachi's shoulder in a scrimmage, pretty much all the nasty things he says to his less talented but much nicer twin brother, oh, and attempting to break the knees of a child in a wheelchair.
- Romeo X Juliet's Lord Laertes Van di Montague does this regularly, but the worst (aside of the terrible massacre of the Back Story) is him forcing his ally Titus into a duel and killing him. In front of Titus's son, Mercutio. And for no reason at all.
- In Blade Of The Immortal, Shira not only kicks the dog, but kills the dog Rin had befriended the previous night and tricks her into eating it. Of course, we already know Shira is beyond Moral Event Horizon and accelerating.
- The World Is Mine introduces its Villain Protagonists by showing Wild Child Mon casually toss the girl he was having sex with out of their moving car onto the freeway. Mon's
bitch partner Toshiya's slide into complete monstrosity happens when he tortures and kills an elderly couple.
- In his early appearances, Mayuri Kurotsuchi from Bleach was clearly designed to be loathed by the audience due to the near constant abuse he levelled towards his Daughter and Lieutenant, Nemu Kurotsuchi.
- There's also the part where he tries to kill Ikkaku when he refuses to answer his questions, before Kenpachi stops him.
- Gin Ichimaru is introduced by slicing off Jidanbo's arm (only making a gash in it in the anime) and suggesting that he should have died defending the gate. And then there's his falsely offering to help save Rukia and all his friends before her execution just to raise and dash her hopes.
- Byakuya does some pretty assholish things in the Soul Society arc, such as refusing to allow Renji to be treated when he's defeated, attempting to overkill Ganjyu simply for being a Shiba, and openly insulting the more merciful Captains such as Ukitake. In fact, some believe that if it wasn't for his Freudian Excuse and becoming a Kuu Dere over Rukia, he would've crossed the Moral Event Horizon.
- Tousen, who after his Resurrection, was able to see for the first time in his life, started laughing like a maniac, commenting on all the things he could see, before turning towards a silent Komamura and remarked that he looked far uglier than he thought. Subverted later, as after being defeated, Tousen actually apologizes to Komamura for having told him such things. Right before he dies.
- Sousuke Aizen has kicked many puppies, but two of these have pretty much been mutilated under the force of his kicks: his ex-lieutenant, Momo Hinamori, and her best friend, Captain Toshiro Hitsugaya. How does he do such things? He stabs the girl to almost death as he reveals himself as Not Quite Dead (and as the end of all the More Than Mind Control he's subjected her to for decades), then gleefully admits it when questioned by Hitsugaya, and seriously injures him when he tries to attack him. And much later? Upon being under attack, he uses his Master Of Illusion powers to make Hitsugaya believe he's attacking him... while in fact, he's attacking Momo. Who took a while to return from the brink of death. ASDASDASDASDAS YOU ASSHOLE.
- Don't forget killing Halibel, who had barely survived fighting Hitsugaya just because he was pissed off that the higher Espada lost.
- And then chasing Ichigo's friends around Karakura with the intention of killing them and provoke Ichigo.
- Practically everyone who suffered in the story is HIS fault.
- While Yamamoto isn't a villain, his method of telling Nanao it was futile for her to follow Kyoraku was cruel: he knocks her unconscious with his Battle Aura, causing Kyoraku to quickly get his lieutenant out of range. The old man was right, as Ise realises whilst still paralysed/in shock that there's no way Kyoraku and Ukitake can defeat their commander and teacher, but it was still very cruel.
- Miss Minchin in Shokojo Sera literally does this, except that it's Kick The Cat, and the cat gets its revenge fairly soon. Ironically, she soon undergoes a probable Heel Face Turn, and is seen holding the same cat in her arms an episode later.
- Deathsaurus in Transformers Victory leaves the Dinoforce to die on Atlantis after he gets enough energy to reactivate his evil fortress of doom. Tragically, they keep on stealing energy while under the impression that he's going to return.
- Grewcica in the Gunnm OVA kills the dog that Gally picked-up.
- In Kinnikuman, Mixer Taitei does an almost literal example (but ratchets up the brutality) by needlessly killing a helpless puppy with his blender blades, thoroughly establishing him as one of the most monstrous heels Kinnikuman would ever face. In Nisei, you also have Dialbolik/Tel Tel Boy killing famous wrestlers just to get an audience's attention.
- In the fourth arc's witches' tea party in Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, Lambdadelta and Bernkastel cracking up at poor Ange's terrible fate was one of the big shots across the bow to keep an eye on those two.
- How. the hell. did Erika smashing Maria's dreams in front of her not make this list?
- Xellos does this every once in while in Slayers, just to remind folks that despite his generally cheerful facade, he IS a Monster and will gladly kill anybody his boss orders him to, Lina included.
- Sakyo of YuYuHakusho does this almost literally as it is revealed in his backstory that he tortured animals in his job at a pet shop in his boredom.
- From Ef A Fairy Tale Of The Two: while nobody ended up dead and she's not exactly a villain, Kei deleting Miyako's very anguished text messages to their common love interest Hiro, after he stands up to her in their date to stay with Kei after she has an accident, and doing so before he can check them up so he won't know poor Miyako's still waiting for him and about to have a nervous breakdown feels very much like this. So much that, for some people, the scene where Kei finds a naked Miyako in Hiro's home, thus becoming aware that they've reconciled, and running away in tears until her injured leg gives in and she collapses comes off as the girl's karmic punishment rather than the Tear Jerker it may have been supposed to be.
- OTOH, when Miyako herself rips Kei apart quite brutally at the end of her chapter, in order to preserve her relationship with Hiro, that also felt like punting a pup. To her credit, she does feel bad afterwards.
- In Girls Bravo Kirie is supposed to be Yukinari's best friend, and she knows about his fear and allergy of women. One would question why she keeps beating the crap out of him and berating him especially after she also learns how his supposed perverted actions are accidental (due to his clumsiness and unluckiness which she is also aware of) and not intentional.
- Kuroshitsuji: In the first episode of the second season, Alois stabs his maid Hannah in the eye with his fingers. For daring to look her master in the eye while serving him. The nerve of her.
- Love Hina: Mitsune "Kitsune" borderlines this a couple times by setting up a situation where Keitaro will get his ass handed to him for no good reason by Naru or Mikoto. In the anime, it was to make it look like he stole the rent money envelope and Haruka had to call her out on it before anyone believed Keitaro. Granted, she never actually hit him herself or remotely tried to get him genuinly killed/kill him for his bad luck and clumsiness (she usually actually laughs it off and calls him a pervert for his reaction), but she never tried to make his life any easier at the Hinata Inn.
- Naru does this regularly by abusing her love interest Keitarou and hitting him constantly. It would be a little more understandable if the guy was a Jerk Ass, but he's actually a Nice Guy who does what he can to make Naru happy, and yet she still abuses him 24/7 and keeps getting away with it. No wonder many people cite Naru's bitchiness as a Tsundere Sue and the reason they stopped reading Love Hina, so turned off they were by her horrifying treatment of him.
- In the Liar Game, Yokoya does this to his two pet mice. I am not sure if he does it in the live action version, as it is very violent compared to the previous chapters.
- The Christmas present episode in Jazz was a massive Kick The Dog moment on Naoki's part.
- About every villain in the Dragon Ball series performs at least one Kick The Dog moment, from Nappa incinerating a city to nothing to Majin Buu transforming whole crowds of civilians into food and eating them and just minutes before KILL EVERY HUMAN ON THE PLANET minus Hercule.
- Izaya does this in Dura Ra Ra! when he spends all of episode 17 making Kida's life literally HELL, even using his Honey Trap Saki for such purposes.
- Fairy Tail had it's fair share of Kick The Dog moments from Gajeel attacking Shadow Gear and Lucy.
- Ultear possessing Jellal and in turns making Erza's life even more miserable.
- Fried attacking Elfman and Insulting Juvia causing her to perform a Heroic Sacrifice
- Faust using using Magnolia as a missile againist The Exceed so he could have infinite magic among other things.
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".
- Cobra Commander did it in a panel of the GI Joe comic. The shot was so popular it was eventually redone as a pin-up some years later (the pin-up version can be seen at the top of this page).
- Megatron one-ups it by ordering the dog shot to death.
- Wilder kicked the dog himself and killed it because it annoyed him.
- In ElfQuest, 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 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 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.
- DC's Maxwell Lord. He shot the second Blue Beetle, Ted Kord, in the head. He made Guy Gardner flip out at his revived girlfriend, fellow superhero Ice, for apparently trying to kill him (it wasn't really her, but Maxwell "pushed" Guy into thinking it was). If that wasn't dickish enough, he mind controls two police officers into shoooting each other. Their dialogue makes it clear that they don't know what's going on. What makes it even worse is that he could have just mindwiped the police officers instead of killing them.
- 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 1940s 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.
- 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 a 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.
- Various villains Kick The Dog throughout Kingdom Come, but Vandal Savage snapping the neck of a secretary for putting the wrong amount of sugar in his coffee kinda takes the cake.
- In King of Klondike, the eighth chapter of The Life And Times Of Scrooge Mc Duck, Soapy Slick kidnaps Scrooge, steals his plot of land and reads his mail. When a letter from home reveals that Scrooge's mother had died, the villain mocks the young duck for it and tells his cronies to kill him. No wonder Scrooge went berserk and trashed the entire steamboat they were on.
- In the fourth volume of Empowered, we see the mastermind who turned the 'Capies' award ceremony into a deathtrap discovered by the titular superheroine. Upon the revelation of his identity, he gives a Motive Rant that seems tailor made to win sympathy from any reader who has bothered following the title (not to mention the No Respect Girl before him). Then he attempts to use the lives of Emp's lover and her best friend to extort sexual favors out of her. Empowered is not pleased, and her suit is rather more intact than it appears.
- In Final Crisis Aftermath: Run #1, the Human Flame—the archetypical small time thug who had Martian Manhunter killed—returns to his family's home, embraces his wife, and tells her how much he had missed her and their daughter. This is all a pretext to steal his car, with the daughter's bike still attached, while the wife is tied to a kitchen chair. Note that the Flame had already crossed a Moral Event Horizon by leading a shootout through a Brand X Chuck E. Cheese. But just when it looked like writer Matt Sturges was humanizing him as at least a loving family man, whammo!
- Earlier, Flame wakes up in a hospital, and his first action is to forcefully punch the young attending nurse, knocking her out. He then knocks a traction patient out of his bed while running away, rationalizing both actions by saying "they probably deserved it."
- Norman Osborn is master of this. The list of his dog kicking moments he's done to Spider-Man alone is very long, and contains thing like having sex with Peter's girlfriend Gwen, making her pregnant and killing her after she gave birth to his children; making those children believe that Peter's their father who abandoned them; killing Peter's unborn child and stealing its body; kidnapping Peter's aunt May and replacing her with an actress, and revealing it after that actress died. All this so Peter could suffer. Oh, and he started the infamous Clone Saga too!
- In Dark Reign he adds some new ones like: shooting two kids because one of them's wearing a Spider-Man mask, impregnating his son's ex-girlfriend (he must really enjoy stealing younger guys' girls) and making his son believe it's his baby, so Norman could manipulate him and kill him in the near future for the biggest benefits (HIS OWN SON!). There's also the possibility that the guy he's using as a guinea pig in his laboratory is his other son, Gabriel Stacy.
- When no-one was looking, Lex Luthor stole forty cakes. That's as many as four tens. And that's terrible.
- In Superpatriot a Nazi kicks one while in a good mood. You can see it here◊/
- In BPRD 1946, cute little girl (and head of the Soviet counterpart to the BPRD) Varvara shows her True Colors when she brutally murders Audo, a disfigured and mentally unwell little boy.
- Hey, maybe Iron Man has a point. Maybe the registration isn't a bad thing. Maybe it's all for the greater good and the corrupt politicians won't manipulate the heroes once they're under their collective thumbs. OMG DID THEY JUST CLONE A GOD AND MAKE HIM KILL GOLIATH!!!?
- On the other hand, dog-kicking is contagious when it comes to Pro-Registration heroes. All right, Ms Marvel, you know that Spider Woman II/Arachne is a traitor to the Pro-Registration side, you are to bring her down... but seriously, separating her with her dearest treasure (her grade-school daughter Rachel) is just... low. Maybe you've gone apologizing, but your friendship has been strained and if anyone's at fault it's you, Carol.
- Just so you know Col. Stryker is evil before you even meet him, his legions kill two unarmed six-year-olds and leave their corpses in a playground for other small impressionable children to see. Then once we do meet him, turns out he murdered his wife and child, his most loyal henchperson, and tried to kill Shadowcat, who at the time was a cute teenage girl.
- Black Tom Cassidy killing Squidboy. Although that was a CMOA for Squidboy, I don't think a nigh immortal tree-god should have been that intimidated.
- If memory serves, this was later RetConned. Turns out his secondary mutation was making Tom lose his shit, and even his long time friend and frequent partner/henchman Juggernaut called him out on it. He appears to show remorse about the whole incident.
- Junior from Secret Six: "Kill him. Leave body for his family to find. Also believe he had a dog. Kill dog."
- A satirical Mad Magazine feature from 1956 proposed "Dog Kicking" as a manly sport analogous to bullfighting. The preferred dogs are Cocker Spaniels "because they yelp louder and longer and are harmless." As for the men who Kick The Dog, "they must possess a rare nobility of soul, unflinching courage and a burning desire, a fever in fact, to Kick Dogs." The Kicking is further divided into three parts, or Tercios: Clobbers, Boots and finally the la Stompa.
- When The Mist shoots his daughter in Starman.
- Todd Ingram is seen kicking a dog in a flashback in book three of Scott Pilgrim.
- Even when he claims to be doing things for the greater good, Sinestro always takes the time to kick a puppy or two along the way. One example that is close to a Moral Event Horizon would be killing Kyle Rayner's mother via the living virus Despotellis and calling her a cow to Kyle's face — all to turn him into Parallax's next host.
- Count Dooku has a long list of Kick The Dog moments. He's a Sith Lord, after all. But one in particular really takes the cake. Before hiring Jango Fett to clone an army, he does an extensive background check on the man, including kidnapping one of his last living comrades and torturing him endlessly. The poor man finally cracks and tells Dooku about his memories of Fett. When he's finished, Dooku orders the interrogation droids to stop his heart. As tears stream down his face, the man begs Dooku not to tell Jango that he betrayed him, and you know what that bastard says? "I can't make any promises. Goodbye."
Fan Fic
Film
- The Lord of the Rings has a few:
- In The Fellowship of the Ring the Ringwraiths decide to chop off a hobbit watchman's head off and drop a door on the gatekeeper. Oh, and they try to kill off all the hobbits while they're in bed. Just in case you didn't yet realize that the creepy cloaked strangers are evil.
- In The Two Towers Saruman decides Wormtongue is now useless. Kicking promptly commences.
- In The Return Of The King they don't so much kick the dog as much as throw the heads of the dog's friends at him.
- 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.
- Evil, but not gratuitous - the dog had discovered the corpse of Thorwald's wife in the garden.
- Another Alfred Hitchcock's example: in Strangers On A Train, Magnificent Bastard Bruno Anthony uses his cigarette to casually puncture a little boy's balloon. Just for the pleasure of being a total dick.
- There's a likely homage in Wes Craven's original Last House On The Left, wherein we see David Hess as Krug do the exact same before his band of socially and sexually deviant weirdos get down to the more serious business at hand.
- Despicable Me has a character-establishing moment at the beginning where the protaganist comforts a child who has dropped an ice-cream cone by... giving him a ballon, after twisting it into some kind of four-legged animal. Protaganist then produces a pin and pops said ballon, and walks off contentedly. Cut to a shocked child with bits of ballon stuck to his face. Yes, he's despicable.
- A dumb racist in Terminator Salvation self-righteously screams at a frightened Chinese woman to "Speak English!!" on the prisoner transport. He deservingly dies for his arrogance later, shot to bloody little pieces by a T600.
- In the 2007 Transformers film, Megatron gets to Kick The Human: while he and Prime recover from a fall during their climactic battle, Megatron casually flicks a fleeing passerby in disgust. It's made somewhat funny that this passerby was in fact the director, Michael Bay.
- 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.
- In Pan's Labyrinth, Captain Vidal is woken up so he can deal with some possible rebels; an old man and his teenage son. They insist that they were hunting rabbits, but he beats the kid's face in with a bottle before even letting him finish his sentence, then shoots them both. He reaches into their pack, and pulls out... a pair of rabbits. He snarls at his men that they should search these assholes before bothering him with them, and goes back to bed. Later, he asks the cooks to make him something from the rabbits. "Perhaps a stew." Nice guy.
- The Jet Li movie Kiss of the Dragon has a scene where the main bad guy forcibly injects the female lead, a woman he had tricked into prostitution, 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 huge 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...until he tortures Westley to death (well, mostly) on Count Rugen's crazy sucking machine, and lies to Buttercup to make her think Westley 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? This one's heinous enough to be Moral Event Horizon material, considering that it was an entire planet and that Tarkin did it as a You Said You Would Let Them Go on Leia, who he had moments before given a Sadistic Choice.
- In episode VI Jabba feeds a defiant slave dancer to his pet rancor. While it does set up for Luke's battle with the beast later on it has little point other then to show how cruel he is.
- Plus, it means we don't feel so bad when Bib Fortuna puts poison in the sithspawn's drink (reducing his life expectancy to days), and then Leia garrotes him (reducing his life expectancy to minutes, if not seconds).
- 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 the not-quite-zombies zombie movie Severed: Forest of the Dead, one of the characters, fearful of the violent (and slightly unbalanced) lumberjacks in the well-defended camp, leaves in the dead of night...and leaves the gate open behind him. He's been kind of a whiny jerk and a pansy up to that point, but that action (leaving the sleeping camp vulnerable to the zombies) ensures his Karmic Death not too long afterward.
- 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 Dog Soldiers, Captain Ryan, 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.
- Later on in the movie, he attempts to shoot another dog to get it to stop barking, but he is thwarted when another character vomits on his head.
- Don't forget Glenn Close's character from Fatal Attraction, in full psycho Yandere mode, killing and cooking the pet rabbit of the protagonist's daughter.
- And she kidnaps the little girl a few days later. Although she returns her unharmed, it seems likely that she wanted to terrify Dan with the notion that she *could* have harmed the child if she wanted to.
- 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!"
- 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.
- The book has Patrick being cruel to many more animals— and then there's that unfilmable scene with the starved rat, a Habitrail tube, and one of his female victims...
- Back To The Future Part II: There's a scene in 1955 where Biff gets a hold of a ball belonging to a bunch of kids, 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 that Biff was a jerkass, but it was over the top.
- In Assault on Precinct 13, one of the gang members shoots an ice cream truck driver, and then a little girl who went back to complain that the man gave her the wrong flavor of ice cream.
- 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 order to make the Chaotic Evil Serial Killer protagonist of Sweeney Todd sympathetic, Christopher Bond and Stephen Sondheim pitted him against Judge Turpin, who is pretty much a dog-kicking machine throughout the play. Among his nastier Kick The Dog moments are: having Benjamin Barker, the man who would become Sweeney, transported to Botany Bay for life just so he could get at his wife Lucy, who he wanted for himself (and then raping her at a masked ball that he has the Beadle lure her to, in a crossing of the Moral Event Horizon), the sentencing of an eight-year-old boy to death by hanging, the entire Wife Husbandry plan he has for his teenage ward Johanna, and subsequently throwing her into a madhouse after learning she wants to marry the sailor Anthony Hope instead of him.
- The Beadle, in addition to helping the Judge carry out his Moral Event Horizon, also gets some Kick The Dog moments of his own. In the film, he savagely whips Anthony with his cane after he is thrown out on Judge Turpin's orders for "gandering" at Johanna. And in the play, he's even crueler — he snaps the neck of the poor little bird that was Anthony's gift to Johanna before threatening him with the same if he ever steps foot on their street again.
- 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.
- Because Batman stole his balloons.
- Can you really blame the Joker for being angry at his minions' incompetence? Why didn't somebody tell the Joker that Batman had one of those...things?
- One of the two muggers from the first sequence gets one when he turns his gun on the little boy of a tourist family the two are in the middle of robbing: "Hey lady, do the kid a favor: don't scream." The partner of the mugger in question even brings it up after telling him about "the bat," shortly before both of them get their asses kicked.
- 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 Adevnt Children Complete, we get to see a glimpse of how Tseng and Elena got their asses handed to them.
- In The Incredible Hulk, 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 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, I don't know what is.
- This scene was so bad that Duncan Regehr (Dracula) actually refused to do the scene in more than one take, and little Ashley Bank (Phoebe) was genuinely terrified when she saw his "evil" contact lenses.
- 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.
- But that poor helicopter pilot...
- 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 trope gets played straight in Jason Takes Manhattan. The main characters get mugged, and when Final Girl's dog starts barking at the the thugs, the lead mugger, with no hesitation whatsoever, tries shooting it.
- Michael Myers from the Halloween series apparently doesn't share the same sentiment, having killed several dogs over the course of his many rampages.
- And eating one of them, apparently. "He got hungry..."
- Early in the first Terminator, the titular character had to run over some children's toys to establish that he is evil. Never mind that he'd already killed (at least) two people in exceptionally ruthless fashion.
- I never thought of that as an "evil" act. It wouldn't have gone out of its way to crush toys. It simply saw no reason not to run over the toys.
- Let's also count the moment in T2, where the T-1000 actually kills John's dog.
- Invoked in Spider-Man 3: Thoman Hayden Church, who played the Sandman, asked the director if he could be shown punching a police dog while fleeing from the cops, so it would be clear that he wasn't an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain. (It was only a puppet, but it gets the point across well enough.)
- Used almost to the point of gratuity in No Country For Old Men; Chigurh arbitrarily murders random innocents several times, based solely on whim and the outcome of a coin toss. He even takes a potshot at a pigeon he passes while crossing a bridge. Ironically (the irony being that he's the most terrifyingly competent and relentless assassin in film history), he misses. Utterly lampshaded early on by Deputy Wendell, who, upon surveying the scene of the drug dealers' massacre in the desert, remarks: "Aw, they even shot the dog." As if the pile of dead bodies and truckload of heroin weren't big enough clues that these are bad people.
- Juno from The Descent gets a few of these, such as cowardly leaving her friend who she accidently stabbed to die slowly and painfully. It is also revealed that she was having an affair with the main character's deceased husband. This was before she becomes a fairly heroic uber-Bad Ass.
- Hunter "Raoul Duke" Thompson has one of these in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas when he suggests selling Lucy into prostitution. Although it's really hard to tell whether or not he was serious or sober.
- The one-eyed "bible salesman" in O Brother Where Art Thou? beats two of the protagonist senseless with a branch to steal whatever it was that they were keeping in that shoe box they were guarding so closely. When he finds out it's a frog (which they thought was a cursed friend), he squeezes the thing dead on his palm, and violently throws it against a tree, making one of the heroes cry. He later gets what's coming for him when a burning cross drops on him.
- In The Invasion, it's not clear what would be so bad about the new world order that's taking shape, until it's made clear that anyone not affected by the change would be executed, rather than simply kept out of positions of influence and allowed to live out their lives
- Not actually an example, but we have to mention that it literally happens in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, after the title character accidentally throws a burrito at a Badass Biker. In retribution, the biker destroys something that Ron Burgundy loves: his puppy Baxter. Baxter returns at the end, wet but unharmed.
- More specifically, he punts the dog off an overpass.
- "THE MAN PUNTED BAXTERRRR!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH AAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!"
- The 1950s version of Show Boat whittles Pete's role down to one of these scenes, taking a slave's necklace on the grounds that she probably stole it, then actually performing his role and mucking things up before being fired.
- In the 2008 film adaptation of The Spirit, the Octopus (the Spirit's nemesis) dons a Nazi uniform and gleefully melts a white fluffy kitten, seemingly just for kicks.
- In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Judge Doom demonstrates The Dip by melting a tiny, adorable shoe toon in it.
- In Superman II, a boy in a small town taken over by the Phantom Zone criminals makes a break for it on horseback for help. Seeing this disobedience, General Zod almost casually signals Non to stop him, which is done by taking a police car flasher light and throwing it hard and accurately enough to apparently kill both kid and horse with one blow. When a woman wails he was just a boy, Ursa purrs sadistically, "And he will never become a man."
- In the Super Mario Bros movie, Koopa kicks his pet dinosaur Yoshi.
- In Birth - when her fiancée beats up (ish) the kid. Though this isn't just a pointless act, I think it still sets up the fiancée for a fall.
- In the Toho film King Kong Escapes, the villain Doctor Who shoots the old man on Kong's island when he comes to take the ape, just responding to his warnings not to take the ape with "Yes. Kong's mine now." before killing him.
- In the classic John Ford western The Searchers, John Wayne is frequently compared to the antagonist — a Comanche chief named Scar — but is differentiated in that while Wayne pets the dog before Indians raid his family's home early in the film, when we later see Scar at his camp before the cavalry raids them, Scar throws a rock off screen at a yapping dog, and we hear a pathetic whimper a second later.
- In The Meteor Man, the Big Bad doesn't kick the dog, he throws a dumpster on the dog! The dog got better.
- The Mask of Zorro does this with resident baddie Captain Harrison Love. For the first fourth or so of the picture, Captain Love seems less like an evil villain and more like a lawman who is only an antagonist because the hero of the movie is an outlaw. Well, we can't have that sort of thing in our summer blockbusters. In order to avoid actually having to deal with moral complexity, we're treated to an Anvilicious scene where Zorro is conversing with the Captain and he randomly takes Zorro's brother's head out of his desk drawer, where it had been "marinating" in something presumably alcoholic, and Captain Love nonchalantly drinks a cupful of it. Drawn straight from the jar. To drive the point home, he tells our hero that he keeps the heads of everyone he kills, because he just loves killing people so very much.
- Truth In Television, sort of...Captain Love was based upon a real life person named Harry Love - A member of the California Rangers - who did kill Joaquin Murrieta (Zorro's brother in the film) in a fire fight; and history states that he did cut off Murrieta's head. However, it wasn't because he wanted the trophy, but because he needed the proof that the deed had been done.
- If you weren't convinced yet that Jane is a little off her rocker in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? by the time Blanche's pet bird goes missing, you'll be quite assured to know Jane's mental status when she kills the bird and puts it on a dinner plate to horrify her disabled sister.
- This trope is kind of spoofed in Blazing Saddles when baddie Mongo punches a horse.
- Occurs in Live And Let Die when Kananga slaps Solitaire in the face after she sleeps with Bond.
- In The Wizard Of Oz it was clear from the first second the Wicked Witch of the West appeared that she was ... well, wicked, particularly when she threatened Dorothy's poor dog in the Trope Namer for And Your Little Dog Too. However, for most of the movie she's more of a Designated Villain, since all she wants is to get her sister's shoes back. When she really gets solidified as evil comes at one of three points:
- When she orders one of her Mooks to drown Toto anyway, even after Dorothy agreed to do whatever the Witch said, a Kick The Dog moment that involved an actual dog. Or ...
- When she locks Dorothy in the room with the evil hourglass (the one that would kill her once it ran out) and the crystal ball, makes Aunt Em appear in it, and then sadistically mocks her once she's completely broken down. Or ...
- When she finally has Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion cornered, she tells Dorothy she will be Forced To Watch. She gloats: "The last to go will see the first three go before her." Even the most generous Alternate Character Interpretation can't make that anything but pure sadism.
- In The Butterfly Effect, Evan's enemy Tommy burns his dog alive after seeing Evan kiss Kayleigh, Tommy's sister when they're 13 years old. It's an even more impacting scene than when Tommy's violence is first established by beating a boy in the movie theater with the metal queue pole, and then smiling at Evan as security drags him out.
- The Young Victoria: After violently manhandling Princess Victoria, Sir John Conroy actually kicks her dog, Dash, as she storms from the room.
- 3 Ninjas: High Noon At Mega Mountain, where male lead villain Lothar shows that he's a big unsympathetic jerk. First, on his way back to central control, he steals a kid's ice-cream, with the kid crying after that. Later on, fifteen-year-old Rocky, the oldest of the heroes tries to save his girlfriend from becoming roller-coaster roadkill. With a sword, Lothar engages into battle with the unarmed Rocky, to the point that they climb up the roller coaster tracks.
- A number of examples from the Warden in The Shawshank Redemption. "Give him another month to think about it."
- X-Men: Last Stand - While Ian McKellen's Magneto may have been a complex Anti Villain with sympathetic goals, his slide toward the Moral Event Horizon is punctuated with increasingly cruel kick-the-dog moments. In particular is when Mystique is hit with a "cure dart" and turns suddenly into a beautiful, stricken, and supremely vulnerable human woman. And then he promptly abandons her without a second thought. Not to mention the fact that she had just saved him.
- He also gets major dog-kicking points in the scene where his forces fight against the goverment. He uses Chess Metaphors, telling his protege, Pyro for them to wait until the pawns (his other followers) exhaust themselves. In this moment, like the above scene, Magneto violates his own standards of decency, since if nothing else, he supposedly cares about mutants.
- At the beginning of Sky Blue, Locke orders a decaying rig to be jettisoned. When one of the Diggers protests that they need time to evacuate, Locke shoots him and threatens to kill the other if he doesn't comply, thus resulting in the deaths of numerous other Diggers. He also kicks several more dogs hard at the end, but telling would be spoileriffic.
- Subverted in Local Hero due to Values Dissonance. After Mac has adopted a rabbit he accidentally hit with his car and takes it to the village, the villagers cook and eat it. They turn out to be good people anyway.
- Used in a very interesting way in the film Cold Turkey. A town is trying to give up smoking for 30 days, so we know they aren't really "bad" people, just highly frustrated. That said, someway into the movie, a man literally kicks a dog and it hilariously goes flying.
- Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in Dune when he pulls the heart plug from one of his slaves and then does something too gruesome to describe here.
- In Nacho Libre, the wrestler who had originally won the battle royal for the opportunity to fight Ramses, Silencio, is fighting against a child beggar over a loaf of bread.
- Near the end of Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, Lucius Malfoy literally kicks the
dog Dobby.
- In the musical film version of Little Shop Of Horrors, Audrey II, after a blatantly evil phone call, reaches into the change slot of a pay phone to see of there are any coins. And Thats Terrible.
- Done literally in the Charlie Chaplin silent short Sunnyside when the villain kicks a dog belonging to a young boy. The antagonist repeatedly kicks Charlie himself in the rear throughout the entire film as well.
- Early on in Metropolis, Joh Fredersen fires one of his overworked assistants for failing to report an accident at the Moloch Machine, effectively dooming him to working in the deplorable conditions underground.
- Done literally in the film Hitler: the Rise of Evil to make absolutely certain that the viewer would understand that Hitler is not to be liked at all.
- The protagonist in Drag Me to Hell sacrifices her kitten in an attempt at placating the demon set upon her by a Gypsy Curse. It doesn't work when all is said and done.
- Inglourious Basterds: Zoller, the subject of Goebbels' propaganda film, is portrayed through most of the movie as a kind, generous, patriotic, somewhat lovesick suitor. The guy is even a film buff. And in one of his last scenes, he shudders at watching Goebbels' glorification of his bloody war heroism. In his last scene, he takes joy in accidentally hurting Shoshanna after she turned him down one more time, barks commands and threats at her and generally gives off a rape vibe. This is the scene that makes it OK to kill him.
- In Disney's Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, when the Queen is on her way out to poison Snow White, she passes a skeleton reaching for a jug of water just outside his dungeon cell. "Thirsty?" she mocks; "then have a drink!" and throws the jug at the skull, destroying it.
- In Return To Oz, the Nome King enjoys a long sequence of kick the dog moments as he becomes steadily more human: to begin with, he reveals that his supposedly innocent contest is actually a death trap for Dorothy's friends, and forces Dorothy and the others to keep playing by threatening to incinerate them; then he sends the childlike Jack Pumpkinhead to participate, clearly enjoying Jack's terror; finally, he reveals that he now owns the Ruby Slippers and mockingly congratulates Dorothy for letting them fall into his hands.
- In the (remarkably boring) 2000 horror thriller The Calling, one of the signs that the sweet US girl's cute little son is evil incarnate is that he kicks away his dog. In case that other hints like not missing his mom one bit, trying to psychically murder a little girl for hogging the swing and impaling a guinea pig didn't work.
- In Shooter, the protagonist sniper reveals that he would have just hid in the wilderness if only the bad guys hadn't shot his dog first.
- In the French film Forbidden Games (Jeux Interdits) it's not enough that the Nazis kill Paulette's parents. They have to kill her dog, too!
- The 2009 Japanese film Goemon probably has one of the most evil examples of this thus far. Saizo tries to assassinate the (mostly corrupt) ruler of Japan, Hideyoshi. Naturally, he fails, and is captured. After Goemon breaks him out, Hideyoshi and his men attack Saizo's home, kill his wife, and abduct his baby son. Being told that his son's life will be spared if he turns himself in, he gladly allows himself to be boiled alive in a giant vat of oil, in front of the entire city. Hideyoshi kicks him into the oil, and this is where the moment comes: when Hideyoshi throws his baby son into the vat 10 seconds later, alive. Literally every other character, be it good, evil, or in between, were disgusted by this act at best. At best.
- In Secret Window, one of the first ways in which the protagonist's stalker demonstrates his overall high level of dangerous creepiness is by killing the protagonist's dog...by stabbing him with a screwdriver. Of course, it turns out it was actually the protagonist himself who did all that, but the point stands.
- In Charlie Wilson's War, the title character tells his assistant about his first foray into politics: When he was a kid, he had a dog that always dug up a neighbor's flowerbeds. The neighbor solved the problem by feeding it dog food with broken glass mixed in. The neighbor was running for city council, so Charlie (after burning up his flowerbeds) went to the poor black neighborhoods in town, where most of the people had never bothered voting in a local election, told them that this candidate had purposely killed his dog, and offered them a ride to the polls. It was enough to lose him the election.
- In the Troma film The Toxic Avenger, the antagonists take dog-kicking to the extreme with their hobby of running people over in their car for fun and taking pictures of the gore that ensues. The most gruesome/hilarious example is provided in the scene where the main characters run over a small child riding his bicycle after taunting him and, upon realizing he is not fully dead, reverse the car over his head. Furthermore, the attractive females of the crew of villains seem to get sexually aroused by the carnage, so...you know. All pretty much standard fare for a Troma film.
- Surprisingly enough averted in the eight Friday The13th, where Jason Voorhees was originally scripted to kick a dog to death, but Kane Hodder explicitly said that such an act would be beneath Jason. You heard me correctly; a psychopathic, machete-wielding, hockeymask-wearing murderer, who had slaughtered upwards to fifty people before this movie, and nearly twenty more during this one, wouldn't Kick The Dog
- In Time Bandits Evil himself shows us how it is done.
- A movie called "What Just Happened," which has a Show Within A Show that everyone hates because the dog gets shot at the end. It shows the jaded audience, desensitized to all forms of human-on-human violence, bored in a movie theater. The antagonist shoots the protagonist and the audience couldn't care less. And then the antagonist shoots the protagonist's dog and everyone is mortified and scarred for life.
- Villain-on-villain kicking: In Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland, The Knave of Hearts tries to kill The Red Queen after she all but confesses her love for him.
- Also, the Red Queen having a talking frog decapitated just for stealing her food.
- Oh, she didn't just behead him. She instructed one of her footmen to go to the frog's home and collect his children, for the sole purpose of eating them. "I love tadpoles on toast."
- In Seven Years in Tibet, a Chinese general kicks a sand mandala.
- In Godzilla, rowdy college students try to drown a dog that never harmed them. Until Mothra drowns them and traps them in her own silk.
- In The Lost World: Jurassic Park one of the hunters zaps a little chicken-size dinosaur with a cattle prod.
- And the T. rex actually eats a dog while on the rampage in San Diego.
- A quick, literal example occurs in Edward Scissorhands. As she walks out to offer Edward some lemonade (and flirt with him), Joyce continuously tells her excited dog to stop yipping. And finally kicks it to make it stop cramping her style.
- In Iron Man 2, Justin Hammer pulls off two separate dog kicks. First, when Vanko asks Hammer to retrieve his beloved cockatoo from his former home in Russia, and Hammer tries to fob off a random pet store cockatoo on him — as if any devoted pet owner wouldn't recognize their own. The second incident occurs shortly thereafter, when Hammer is displeased with Vanko's apparent lack of progress on Hammer's line of battle suits; he has one of his thugs stuff the poor bird in a bag and take it away along with many of Vanko's other comforts.
- In the French cult movie La Cité de la Peur, a random cat gets kicked twice by the hammer and sickle wielding serial-killer. This is also a Running Joke, since Les Nuls, who produced the movie, are well known for their hatred towards cats (Le Chat Machine and CCC, anyone?)
- In the opening scene of Once Upon A Time In China 2, the White Lotus Sect burns a dog because it's a foreign breed.
- The first villainous thing we see Pinhead do in Hellraiser: Bloodline is feed a little white dove to the Chatter Beast.
- The villain in Urban Legend randomly microwaved a dog.
- Orson Welles' film The Stranger provides a literal example of this trope.
- In The Wild Bunch, Angel, the only Mexican in the title band, has been handed over to Mapache after he uses one of the crates of guns meant for the General to arm his people and give them a chance against the General due to being ratted out by the mother of his former girlfriend, whom Angel had gunned down in a fit of jealousy upon finding her with Mapache. When the other members visit Mapache's village, they come across a sickening scene in which Angel is being tortured by being dragged along the ground from a rope tied to the fender of Mapache's new car to the joyous laughter of the villagers. Pike and Dutch are both utterly appalled by this despicable act:
Pike: God I hate to see that!
Dutch: No more than I do.
- Dogville. Sweet dear Lord, Dogville. The whole movie would have to be recited to number the times. The movie vividly demonstrates the dangers of Dog Kicking. Ironically, an actual dog doesn't suffer at all.
- Alan Rickman's Sheriff Of Nottingham cements his status as the villain of Robin Hood Prince Of Thieves (and the best part of the film) when discovers that Robin is only getting more popular:
Sheriff: That's it then. Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings. And call off Christmas!
- The moment in The Golden Compass when Mrs. Coulter hits her daemon.
- In Con Air designated Jerk Ass Malloy has two of these in one scene, where he speeds up in his ridiculously expensive car (which of course, despite not being an act of maliciousness or cruelty or the like automatically makes him a Jerk Ass) and parks, you guessed it, in the handicap parking space.
Literature
- In Albert Camus' The Stranger, Mr. Meursault's neighbor, old man Salamano, is known for habitually beating and cursing his equally old dog. But later on this leads to Even Evil Has Loved Ones. After the old man loses his dog while at the fair, he shares his fear with Meursault that he may never see it again. Soon after saying goodnight and closing the door to his apartment, Meursault hears through a wall Salamano weeping.
- In Chung Kuo, deVore blows up the dog with explosives in an infamous scene. Apparently this is to make it clear that even though he is one of the rebels, he is to be seen as a villain
- 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.
- Another Stephen King example: in 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 it's 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.
- And another: in The Green Mile, Percy Wetmore gets two — first stomping Mr. Jingles, Eduard Delacroix's pet mouse, which was done just to be a sadistic jerk, and his deliberate sabotage of Del's execution (resulting in a truly Cruel And Unusual Death for Del) in revenge for Del laughing at Percy pissing himself in fear because of Wharton, with Percy capping it off with a cruel taunt to Del on the chair about how "there is no Mouseville" directly before said execution instead of simply letting him die happy.
- In In Cold Blood. At one point Dick deliberately runs over a stray dog with his car. His comment to Perry is "Boy! We sure splattered him!"
- 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.
- And later, when considering if Vorbis might have made a better Chosen One than Brutha, Om comes to the chilling realisation that if Vorbis had known the tortoise was the god to whom he had supposedly dedicated his life, he'd probably have done it anyway.
- 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 crossing the Moral Event Horizon, given the dog had probably been kicked fairly severely by this point. The scary part is, she thinks she's the good one.
- In Carpe Jugulum, after the Magpyrs lose their cool, they kill Igor's patchwork dog Scraps and abduct Queen Magrat and her infant daughter.
- When Captain Quirke first appears in Men At Arms, he does a series of actions which are all fairly unpleasant, culminating with literally kicking Gaspode the Wonder Dog.
- 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.
- Except he didn't kick the dog. He whipped it with, if I'm not mistaken, an electrical cord. But pretty close.
- 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.
- There's also Viserys Targaryen, who actually has a dog kicking moment in every scene he appears in in A Game of Thrones.
- In The Algebraist by Iain 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 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 didn't kick 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 kicking 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.
- Indeed, the main question is why Belgarath feels guilty about it, even though Zedar set someone on fire without feeling the slightest bit guilty about it.
- Well there is the fact that his will was totally broken by Torak. Who he only came into contact with because he was trying to help stop him. And Polgara pointed out herself that Torak intended to do the same to her and she would have been unable to resist, leaving her in a state where she would joyously serve him while deep within her mind screaming in horror at what she'd become. And then Belgarath took someone in that same position and instead of say freeing him from that instead compounded his suffering by shoving him into an And I Must Scream scenario on top of the one he was already in. Yeah what the Hell, Belgarath?
- The series also contains an example of a literal dog-kicking, although it is only distantly heard by the characters as an abruptly silenced barking followed by a yelp. It's also revealed that Taur Urgas' favoured son and crown prince was a Complete Monster who, as a child, amused himself by dropping live puppies in boiling water.
- Not to mention that when the heroes hear the above dog kicking in town one of them says that kicking a dog to make it be quiet is horrible and he would like to go in and see how that person liked it.
- 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, though Bill attempted to drown it because it was mentioned on his wanted poster.
- In the musical adaptation Oliver!, Bill tries to kill it, but it not only runs away, it leads the chase right to him.
- 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.
- Also, Mr. Norrell himself, when he mentions that he doesn't care whether Lady Pole lives or dies, only what her husband thinks of him.
- 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 they quarrel.
- 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.
- 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.
- Evil Sorcerer Pryrates in Tad Williams' 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). And this is just his Establishing Character Moment—he gets worse.
- 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."
- Note this only applies to domestic villains, and not all of them. Increasingly in the later books, the use of "cargo" or similar for manpower slaves serves much the same function.
- Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights has Heathcliff actually hang his future wife Isabella's puppy.
- Right in front of her. Then he tells her he'd like to destroy anything and everything she loves. She marries him anyway.
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe book "Dark Apprentice" has a fairly obvious kick the dog moment when Admiral Daala orders her commanders to level an unarmed colony on Dantooine. This despite Daala stating that the planet "is too remote for an effective demonstration." The obviousness of this trope is made evident when she subsequently observes that she wouldn't "have another opportunity to catch the New Republic so unprepared." So why waste the opportunity on a ridiculous, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-target? To show just how cold, evil, and tactically inept she is, of course.
- In the same trilogy, Moruth Doole is shown to have a slave harem where he essentially rapes female Rybets, and then uses the offspring as slave laborers in his mining operation. If that doesn't make him evil enough for a Karmic Death, then he is also guilty of having the offspring murdered when they get large enough to challenge him.
- In the X Wing Series, Flirry Vorru gets a moment that is simultaneously this and Kick The Son Of A Bitch. He was an Imperial Moff who got sent to Kessel for massive corruption; typically he's urbane and civilized, but when he "disciplines" an unlikeable lesser criminal who had recently been gut-shot, the Rebels he's working with make a note on how quickly his mood changes.
Vorru's right hand struck fast and slapped Thyne on the belly. The younger man howled, then, as he doubled over, Vorru grabbed him by the neck and slammed his forehead into the table. Thyne, glassy-eyed, rebounded and Vorru flung him from his chair. "For some people, discipline is a lesson. For others it is a lifetime."
- In Dark Force Rising Grand Admiral Thrawn abuses Mara Jade's trust pretty ruthlessly, following her to Talon Karrde's hideout and kidnappping him off to the Chimaera for... questioning. What's worse is he does it in a fashion that makes all of Mara's erstwhile smuggler friends believe that she had been working for Thrawn the entire time. This incident is what convinces Mara to begin her Heel Face Turn.
- In James Thurber's The 13 Clocks, the wicked Duke imprisoned children in the tower for sleeping in his camellias.
- Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games starts off with a man taking revenge on his adulterous wife by tossing her cute little puppy out the window.
- Eeluk in Wolf of the Plains declares himself the new khan of the wolves and exiles Temujin's family, taking their ger, ponies, and all their possessions to force them to die on the steppes, then kills the clan bard for the crime of protesting this was evil. Just to make things worse, he does this during Yesugei's funeral.
- In the novel American Psycho, insane serial killer Patrick Bateman kills a dog (along with his owner), and casually mentions tormenting a puppy to death. When at the zoo, he throws coins to the seals, just because he saw a table asking people not to do so.
- In One Shot, by Lee Child, Jack Reacher is helping investigate a shooting spree. A police officer mentions that after arresting the suspect, they sent the dog to the pound and it was put to sleep. Reacher says, "That's cold... the damn dog didn't do anything wrong." Bear in mind that Reacher is a giant of a man who kills several people with his bare hands in the series.
- The midpoint of The Player Of Games sees main character Jernau Gurgeh unmotivated and on the edge of a Heroic BSOD due to the culture clash he's experiencing: to the Azadians, Azad is the epitome of Serious Business, involving life-and-death stakes, while to Gurgeh it's nothing more than an interesting game. Since Gurgeh quitting the Azad tournament is not in accordance with Special Circumstances' plans, his Handler takes him on a quick tour of the city that amounts to a kick the dog moment for the entire Empire of Azad. The result is exactly what SC wanted.
- In The Curious Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, the very first time Hyde is described, he is seen by the narrator walking down a street and running into and trampling a girl without so much as breaking stride. Fits the trope even more appropriately because for Hyde, there was no real hostile intent behind the action: she just happened to be in his way while he was walking.
- In The Knife of Never Letting Go it practically becomes a running theme that any villain in the book will hurt the main character's pet dog. First one man cuts half of his tail off while trying to kill his master, another kicks him in the face so hard that it injures his eye and breaks some of his teeth, and ultimately the Big Bad kills him by snapping his neck.
- In order to ensure that we don't sympathise too much with Alaric from the Warhammer 40000 Grey Knights novels, who is otherwise pretty much a "pure white" hero, he spouts stolid Knight Templar dogmatisms from time to time, such as threatening a techpriest with death for admiring some advanced technology unavailable to the Imperium.
- John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos kill a dog and a bull that respectively bit and chased one of their number.
- American Gods contains a scene in which Wednesday taunts and shortchanges a random waitress. Shadow, feeling sympathetic, makes sure she gets the correct amount. Any sympathy for the girl is lost moments later, when Wednesday reveals the girl's many horrible little deeds — among them, when she was little, locking a kitten in a closet for days, listening to it mew, and then burying it outside, for no reason other than that she wanted to bury something.
- Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park finally opens her suitor Edmund's eyes to her true character when she stealthily wishes in a letter to the heroine for Edmund's ill older brother to die, which would make Edmund, as the next heir of his father's wealth and title, rich enough for her to consider marrying. Now if only more readers could come to the same conclusion...
- In Moonraker (the novel, not the movie), an otherwise tense car chase between James Bond and Hugo Drax is interrupted by a third car, whose driver taunts Bond as he passes him. Bond laughs it off, but as the third car tries to pass Drax, Drax drives it off the road.
- Anthony Horowitz may possibly have been making fun of this trope in one of his Diamond Brothers stories. A man who ran a charity for children was run over and crushed flat by a steamroller. Nick and Tim Diamond, in the course of their investigation into this matter, go to question the man who was driving the steamroller at the time, who has been treated extensively for shock and has only recently recovered enough to speak. Against the advice of the doctor at the hospital where he is being kept for treatment, though, Tim proceeds to slip in all sorts of remarks that traumatize the driver all over again—including "Would you like a Coke with crushed ice?" "It's time we got to the crunch" and "Can we run over a couple things." This culminates in the driver jumping out of a closed window and running away screaming. This has no significance to the plot whatsoever; so either it was a kick the dog moment for Tim, or we were just getting to see, yet again, how idiotic he really is.
- The Codex Alera wastes no time in letting us no that High Lord Kalarus is a bit of a dick. He uses his first scene to threaten Isana, make sexist comments, and smack and verbally abuse the innocent and cute slave courtesan Serai. He also sent assassins against Isana and tried to kill Tavi and Max for making his son Brencis (who was himself introduced torturing the most harmless-looking Academs he could find) look weak. And he hits Brencis too for losing to them. This makes for a lovely lead-up to his bounding leap over the Moral Event Horizon revealed in the third book.
- A children's book titled No Biting tells the reader on each page what they must not do and what they can do instead. One page instructs the young reader that they must never kick a dog. They may, however, kick a ball.
- In David Copperfield, Handsome Devil James Steerforth gets two very noticeable Kick The Dog moments. First, when as a 14-years-old he insults Mr. Mell for trying to do his work and helps Mr. Creakle get him fired. Years later, he seduces David's childhood friend Emily when she's about to get married to her stepbrother Cam and they run away. And later we find out that he abuses her during the time they're together.
- In Lois Mc Master Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, we have all-around winner Lord Richars, who drowns his twelve year-old cousin Donna's puppy after she fights off his rape attempt. Many years later, when she has a sex-change operation (going from from Donna to Dono) and challenges his claim to her/his late brother's title, he tries to have Dono castrated. In the back of a van, without anesthetic.
- Used literally in Agnes Grey: Reverend Hatfield kicks Nancy's cat and Agnes' dog; he's actually a vain, selfish Hypocrite better at scaring people than bringing them to the Lord. His curate Mr. Weston is kind to both animals and even rescues them at some point; he's Agnes' proverbial Prince Charming. The significance of this contrast between the two does not escape the heroine's notice.
- Used almost literally in Deerskin: When the evil king is about to rape his daughter, Lissar's loyal sighthound Ash jumps to the princess's defense. The king flings the dog against the wall hard enough to knock her unconscious.
- In Jo Clayton's Moongather, the Noris uses Serroi (then about ten) as a conduit by which to suck the life force out of various animals and transform them into demons. The doomed menagerie includes a litter of puppies.
- Javert in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables gets a Kick The Dog moment when he taunts Fantine in her dying moments. Tellingly, the adapters of the musical, who needed the audience not to write the character off as a Complete Monster (at least, not quite that early in the show), have him arrive on the scene after Fantine has already died.
- Done in Eclipse by the Volturi to the newborn vampire Bree Tanner. Despite her being able to control herself, surrendering, and not knowing the laws of vampires, the Volturi kill her even after the Cullens had volunteered to take her in.
- In R.A. Salvatore's The Crystal Shard, Akar Kessel comes close to doing this literally, except it's a cat and he tries to kill it with a magic spell (for practice) instead of kicking it. Animal lovers have nothing to worry about, since at that time he's pretty hopeless when it comes to spellcasting.
- Rita Skeeter does this so much in the first book she appears in that she is probably one of the most hated characters in the series. She embellishes a story about how Harry feels about being in the Triwizard Tournament (it's established from the start that she puts words in peoples' mouths and has nothing nice to say about anyone but herself) and once called Albus. Freaking. Dumbledore. an "obsolete dingbat". She also wrote a scathing article about Hermione being a gold digger because Hermione had the guts to criticize her, then wrote an article about Harry apparently going crazy or just being an Attention Whore due to his scar hurting more and more lately. She also revealed Hagrid's half-giant heritage to all of the UK, using people like the Malfoys as quote sources. She gets hers at the end, though, with Hermione holding the information that she's an unregistered Animagus (being unregistered is illegal and violators are subject to a few years in Azkaban) over her head, making her quit the Daily Prophet and stop writing nasty stories. In book 5 she actually does some good, though, getting the truth out about Voldemort through The Quibbler since the Prophet can't be trusted due to the Ministry attempting to discredit Harry and Dumbledore at every turn.
- Also, any time Snape is mean to Neville. Sure, Snape is also unreasonably cruel to Harry, Ron, and Hermione in and out of class, but they seem better equipped to handle it than Neville does.
Live Action TV
- MacGyver 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.
- Truth In Television. A significant portion of domestic abusers and other criminals start out (and continue) abusing animals.
- 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.
- 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.
- A lot of fans thought that Tom Zarek ordering the execution of the entire Quorum of Twelve during The Mutiny fit this trope, even though his ruthless action makes sense in a coup where you have to seize power first and worry about how it looks afterwards. The problem was while Zarek had been accused of any number of nefarious deeds, most famously blowing up a government building, the audience had never actually seen him commit an atrocity until that point.
- 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!"
- Also, it was on Valentine's Day.
- Angel, Drusilla, and Spike then spend several episodes announcing that they are feeding on puppies and babies For The Evulz. Mostly Offstage Villainy, but Drusilla did carry around a puppy for the express purpose of feeding on it later.
- 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 Season Three, the Mayor is Affably Evil (he likes the Boy Scouts, thinks children are the future, and gives his best girl a flower print dress because she should feel pretty). It's easy to like the guy. When he sees his girl in a coma, he gets upset and the audience connects with him even more. Then he tries to smother an unconscious Buffy. Not cool.
- This later gets an Ironic Echo in Angel, where Wes betrays Angel and accidentally gets Angel's son taken by his enemy and then to a hell dimension, and Wes gets his throat cut. In the hospital, Angel tries to do the same thing to Wes, except with a pillow instead.
- Willow in season 6 episode "Tabula Rasa" thinks it's a great idea to brainwash her girlfriend and friends to forget all the trouble's they've had, most notably the ones she's personally caused by being too dependent on magic to solve her problems. Yeah, that ought to do it.
- A better example of Willow kicking the dog is during her time as Dark Willow. OK, so tracking down and killing Warren, the man who murdered her girlfriend, is almost understandable. However, she kicks the dog when she decides to hunt down and kill Jonathan and Andrew, two Ineffectual Sympathetic Villains who were working with Warren, but had no idea how evil he was, and certainly had no part in Tara's death (being in jail at the time).
- Warren was seen as a Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain just the same as Jonathan and Andrew right up until the moment he murders his ex-girlfriend after trying to basically rape her. This is also his Moral Event Horizon even before what he did to Tara.
- Giles himself gets an offscreen one in Angel. When Angel calls to say that one of his team, Fred, is dying and that they desperately need help, Giles says that powerful witch Willow is busy. And then puts Angel on hold.
- iCarly: During the iMeet Fred episode, Sam bashed Freddie with a tennis racquet so hard it broke, then threw him out of a treehouse. Many people identify that episode as the moment that Sam went too far. Some people went so far as to stop watching the show completely after that.
- 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 as he heads back on board later go down easier with the audience.
- Soon fortified when he threatened to shoot Kaylee in the throat, after already almost killing her once by accident.
- Not to mention that he spends the entire scene before Mal takes him down pointing a gun at the head of a traumatized, terrified River, who's on the verge of tears the whole time. And Jayne indicates that 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.
- Jubal Early from "Objects in Space" very quickly goes from witty Bad Ass Bounty Hunter to unpleasant bastard right around the time he ties up and threatens to rape Kaylee.
- 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.
- Played for laughs in the pilot episode of New Tricks; 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. Although the shooting was reasonable and justified given that it was attacking her, the resulting public outcry over the incident completely derails her career and makes her a laughing stock, resulting in her 'promotion' to the head of the UCOS team. To make matters worse, the incident also kick-started a chain reaction which led to some poor kidnap victim jumping out of a window blindfolded in the process... which everyone ignores, because they're too busy being outraged about the dog.
- 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 fun 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.
- The writers behind Mad Men seem to be engaged in a perpetual puppy punting contest. In Season One alone, the charming and unnervingly likable Don Draper brutally humiliates Sterling by sabotaging his meeting with the Nixon campaign in spectacular fashion. This, of course, only comes off as a prank compared to when Don drives his loving younger brother to suicide by forcing him to accept a bribe to stay out of Draper's life. And all of this is utterly blown out of the water by Joan's absolutely brutal subversion of the Romantic Two Girl Friendship. Not only does she brush off her roommate's heart-wrenching confession with "you've had a hard day," she proceeds to bang a guy right in front of her. Now that's pretty much worth a field goal right there.
- A notable moment involving a literal dog has the seemingly alcoholic Duck Phillips abandoning his dog to get his drink on in peace. Chauncey, we hardly knew ya.
- Betty from Ugly Betty literally kicks a puppy in a daydream she has when she's imagining she's Wilhelmina, the shows resident dog kicker.
- Done literally in this commercial. The dog did deserve it though.
- Farscape. In "That Old Black Magic" Crais receives a direct order from Peacekeeper High Command to end his pursuit of John Crichton and return to base. His second-in-command Lt. Teeg destroys the message and assures him that no one else knows about it. Crais repays this loyalty by breaking her neck to ensure that no one ever will.
- Scorpius gets one late in the second season, when he has Braca beat the crap out of Natira's assistant for wasting his time.
- In Malcolm In The Middle, Reese has a phenomenally evil moment in "Evacuation" - he barters his way up from having the only plastic cups in the makeshift shelter to, among others, taking a man's watch in exchange for five blankets; giving an old, disabled man a blanket in exchange for his scooter and, eventually, having two diabetics bidding against one another for insulin. INSULIN.
- Played fairly literally in the season finale of True Blood, where Drew Marshall the real name of Rene, who's committed all the murders of the women kicks Sam, who's in his dog form.
- Heroes: In season 3, Big Bad Arthur Petrelli, a Smug Snake for the ages, is basically the Anthropomorphic Personification of dog kicking. Without any other characterization to get in the way, he can truly embody it on this plane. Let's take a look:
- Psychically paralyzes his wife.
- Kills off the most consistently entertaining character.
- Gives his son a hug just to steal his god-like powers
- Keeps threatening to re-cripple Daphne.
- Throws Hiro off a roof.
- Decapitates someone who was being helpful (this didn't sting too much because the other dude didn't have much characterization, it happened off-screen, and he didn't use his bare hands - I guess it would have been too interesting to show him with blood all over his suit).
- Tells a warlord to kill his other son (who he tried to kill in the past, too).
- Maintains only one tone of voice throughout...and unfortunately, it's not that of a Large Ham
- Several characters on Lost have fulfilled this trope:
- Benjamin Linus has several dog-kicking moments in season 3, in order to build him up as an unsympathetic villain before revealing he is a more complex character. This is best epitimized when Ben shakes a bunny with a pacemaker to death, but later reveals the bunny never had one to begin with.
- Martin Keamy takes Ben's "daughter" Alex hostage in order to coax him out and into imprisonment. Ben tries to call his bluff by saying she means nothing to him. Keamy then emotionlessly shoots her in the head and walks off.
- Phil, an annoying Mauve Shirt DHARMA Initiative security person, is present while Radzinsky and Horace Goodspeed interrogate Sawyer as to the whereabouts of Kate. When Sawyer won't talk, Phil says he knows a solution, promptly punching Sawyer's girlfriend Juliet in the face. Executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse confirmed this scene was meant to be a kick the dog moment for Phil, and combined with Sawyer's promise to kill Phil for his action, all but confirms Phil will meet an untimely demise.
- At the end of the Legend Of The Seeker episode "Fever," Darken Rahl has a kill the cat moment, a cat he had been cuddling just a second before, after getting a piece of particularly bad news. Bad Darken Rahl!
- In the Star Trek The Next Generation "Datalore", Lore, after changing clothes with Data and leaving him unconscious, then kicks him in the head, showing the viewers just how much a bad guy Data's Evil Twin was.
- In the Doctor Who episode "Utopia," the newly awakened Master immediately demonstrates his competence as a villain by shutting his enemies out of the control centre and setting the Futurekind on them. However, his Kick The Dog moment comes when his longtime loyal assistant Chantho threatens to stop him with a gun. He turns on her with an exposed electric cable with the chilling remark, "Oh ... now I can say I was provoked."
- And, amazingly, the episode "The Waters of Mars" dares to do this to the much-beloved Tenth Doctor himself. The Doctor's declaration of himself as the "Time Lord victorious" who can choose who deserves to live or die is a conscious effort to prepare viewers for the fact that the Doctor's approaching regeneration is neccesary and timely. The Doctor is even called on it by the very woman he is saving, and her subsequent suicide pulls him up sharply (although the episode ends on an ambiguous note, so we're not sure if he accepted or ignored this revelation).
- For a literal Kick the Dog moment, see "Meglos", where the mercenary kicks K-9. According to the commentary, the actor, who was best known for playing hammy villains, added this business himself because he figured the fans would be expecting it.
- The Daleks kick dogs (or worse) left, right and center every time they appear. Just one example: In "Victory of the Daleks", they target WWII London with a pulse that causes all the lights in the city to turn on, making them a massive target for the incoming Nazi bombers.
- The PM in Torchwood: "Children of Earth" kicks the dog twice. In Day Four, just after everyone in Thames House has died, he turns to Lois Habiba, who is partly and wholly unwillingly responsible for this and asks: "Happy now?" And then, in Day Five, he expresses relief when learning that at least he will be able to blame the Americans for everything that went wrong.
- Connor Temple of Primeval thought he'd got a stroke of good fortune when he met hot geek Caroline Steel...that is of course until she stuck the team mascot, an adorable lizard by the name of Rex, in the refrigerator attempting to freeze him to death and exposing herself to everyone (except naive Connor) as a stone-cold bitch.
- After veering back and forth for three seasons of Arrested Development, George and Lucille Bluth cement themselves as unlikable people after learning that a woman Michael is on the verge of marrying is both mentally retarded and incredibly wealthy; they opt to conceal these facts from Michael and speed the wedding along, in the hopes that they can exploit her in order to restore their own fortune. This is only topped in the Series Finale when Lucille reveals that they only adopted Lindsey as a gesture of spite towards Stan Sitwell. She freely admits that they never actully wanted Lindsey, and kept her adoption a secret (raising her as Michael's twin) to preserve their own image. This fact puts Lucille's psychological abuse of Lindsey in a much darker light.
- Played for laughs in "The Body Politic," an episode of the Dawn French anthology series Murder Most Horrid. French's character literally kicks several dogs while disposing of a body.
- In one episode of Merlin, Arthur went to go get a flower to cure Merlin against his father's orders. As soon as he came back, his own father imprisoned him for disobeying orders. Arthur didn't care if he stayed in prison for days or weeks, as long as the flower got to Merlin. He even begged his father to at least deliver the flower. Uther simply crushed the flower in front of Arthur, told him to get another servant and dropped the flower just out of Arthur's reach.
- Quite a few villains do this in Star Trek The Original Series. In the episode that Khan first appeared, he blackmailed the crew to join him by forcing them to watch Kirk being suffocated in the decompression chamber.
- In the same episode, one of Khan's henchmen slapped Uhura when she defiantly glared at him and would have done it again on two other occasions if someone hadn't interrupted him.
- "Turnabout Intruder". Dr Janice Lester, while in Kirk's body, hit Kirk, who was in her weakened body at the time, when Kirk had the misfortune of entering a room with her in it while trying to warn Spock and Mc Coy about her.
- In "The Empath", the Vians tortured Kirk and Mc Coy to provoke a reaction out of the sweet empath Gem, just to see if her species was worth being saved.
- In "Plato's Stepchildren", the Platonians entertained themselves by using their psychic powers to force Kirk and Spock into some humilating situations. In one instance, they had Kirk lying helplessly on the ground, with Spock's feet about to step on his face. Later on, they would bring in Uhura and Chapel and force them to kiss Kirk and Spock. They even made Kirk and Spock hit them.
- Quite a few patients on All Creatures Great And Small are victims of abuse or neglect. James puts it best when talking about a cat that's been brought in half dead.
James: Looks like he could have been mauled. Or badly kicked.
Tristan: Some kick.
James: Some people.
- In the 1795 flashback of Dark Shadows, Victoria Winters, sent back in time from the present, is convicted of witchcraft, mostly from her apperiance in the past in modern clothing and her inability to keep quiet about future events (in a vain attempt to keep them from happening), but the case against her is helped by the REAL witch, Angelique, even though by that point she was "dead" (i.e. Invincable) and she was no longer in danger of being exposed, and Vicky wasn't a loved one of Barnabas, so it wouldn't have helped her vendetta in anyway. This is augmented at the end of the flashback, when Vicky is sent back to the present and the governess she switched places with is sent back to die in her place. the present day Barnabas recognizes the other governess, implying that she suffered the exact same fate, and didn't have any of Vicky's disadvantages.
- Iljimae: The son of China's convoy in Korea decided to get drunk and go horse riding, speeding through the public market like an obstacle course. One "obstacle" he tries to clear is a little girl, Yang-sun, Yong's self-proclaimed "wife". He doesn't clear it. She doesn't make it.
- In an episode of the Australian show Good News Week, a rather literal example occurs, and is Lampshaded. After solving a puzzle involving a toy dog, a guest drop kicks it into the distance, saying that "Now the audience is going to hate me."
- On Scrubs: during the episode when Dr. Cox's old high school friend comes to town, they get into a pissing contest off the roof of the hospital, ending when the his friend hits the dog they were aiming for. This is a case of pissing on the dog.
Dr. Cox: You know, I see that dog around the neighborhood. I think we killed its spirit.
- Done rather hideously in the "Boston Legal" season 3 episode 'The Good Lawyer', when series protagonist Alan Shore uses his knowledge of his friend Jerry Espenson's Asperger's Syndrome to derail Jerry's hitherto effective defense, and shatter his confidence. Apparently done as part of season 3's overarching attempt to show that Shore's repeated statements that, despite all appearances, he was actually not a very good person were in fact true, and not merely false humility.
- In Japanese drama Shokojo Sera (a remake of A Little Princess), the chef and his wife treat Seira and Kaito (the Expy for Becky) quite cruelly, driving Seira to exhaustion many times after she had found out her father had died, giving her no sympathy. In their first appearance, they laughed and mocked Kaito's dream to enter high school, telling him it would be better to give up. They would continue this for the rest of the series though they do get their punishment in the end.
Newspaper Comics
- The would-be-governor villain of the season from this Mark Trail storyline decided to cement his evilness by kicking the proverbial pet deer.
Professional Wrestling
- Triple H from WWE Monday Night Raw joked about this trope saying, "I'm gonna beat Batista like a bag of puppies."
- Trips is quite good at forcing Heel Face Turns doing this, especially if it looks like he'd become a good guy himself. However, Genre Savvy Batista didn't suffer the same fate as Randy Orton (and a year later, Ric Flair) did.
- 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. Also, when the WWF was desperate for Stone Cold to be considered a heel and not be cheered after Wrestlemania X-Seven, he crossed the Moral Event Horizon by beating up J.R. Basically, if you need your wrestler to be a hated heel, have him beat up the guy with Ball's Palsy whose the most kick ass commentator in the business.
- Taker's first Heel Face Turn was brought about by then partner Jake "the Snake" Roberts trying to take a steel chair to Miss Elizabeth, the wife and manager of "Macho Man" Randy Savage, with whom he had a serious feud.
- 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.
- Another method for this involves a tag team or stable splitting with one member pulling a Face Heel Turn and absolutely brutalizing his partner for whatever petty reason the new villain has been stewing over. Examples include Edge and Christian, Shawn Michaels and Marty Jenetty, the Hardys (at least twice), Jericho and the WWE team during Survivor Series 2001, Rey Mysterio/Eddie Guerrero (again, at least twice), Rey Mysterio/Chavo Guerrero, Rey Mysterio/Spike Dudley...
- Let's not even go into how many of these Rey's gotten. Big Show slamming him into the turnbuckle while in a stretcher, Eddie Guerrero's brutal Face Heel Turn...really sucks to be the smallest fish in a tank full of piranhas, especially when the Cruiserwight Title's been dropped.
- Randy Orton from 2006 onwards. Talk about a Generation Xerox...and he takes it one step further by having a punt as his other Finishing Move.
- Matt Hardy turned on his brother Jeff by knocking him in the head and costing him his first-ever WWE Championship against their mortal enemy, Edge. Jeff refused to fight him. Matt verbally assaulted and berated Jeff for two weeks and beat up a mutual friend mercilessly. Jeff refused to fight him. Matt called Jeff out and backhanded him to the ground. Jeff refused to fight him. Matt cost Jeff a chance to be in the Money In The Bank Ladder Match at Wrestlemania 25. Jeff STILL refused to fight him. Then Matt came out, carrying the burnt collar of Jeff's dead dog, and admitted he was the one who had killed Jeff's dog (and burnt his house and tried to kill him several times, but it was mostly about the dog here). At this point, Jeff finally snaps and proceeds to open the proverbial can of whoopass.
- He diddn't actually kill the dog, or set the house on fire, that was faulty wiring, but he did find the dog after it had died & stole its collar. Matt's character was an Ass but he wasn't a Complete Monster.
Tabletop Games
Theatre
- 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.
- As far as marking her as a credible threat goes, Sarah Jane's real Kick The Dog moment is when she turns her gun on her infant son, because he wanted an ice-cream. Thankfully, she doesn't pull the trigger.
- Shakespeare's character Iago in Othello, encouraging the evil deeds of his henchman Roderigo: "...drown cats and blind puppies..."
Toys
- The Piraka in Bionicle would occasionally kill animals for fun.
- Chiara, supposedly one of the good guys, had a scene where she casually killed a lizard with her electricity powers just to make a point. Because of this trope, many fans assumed it was foreshadowing a darker side to her personality, but Word Of God states that this is not the case.
Video Games
- Alan Wake: The first boss-like foe is revealed to have done this, except with an axe, and to a dog that loved and trusted him, in one of the Nightmare manuscript pages, proving the Darkness is really, really mean.
- 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.
- Ironically enough, the Panda King got a moment of his own in the first game when he caused a village to be destroyed by an avalanche when testing out his fireworks.
- Borderlands: You're told to get an important macguffin from a bandit leader named Krom. You know nothing about him except for that. Problem is, he's the first major villain that doesn't wear a mask, so players might think he has some secret, sympathetic past. What's the very first thing he does when you see him? Shoot a cowering Claptrap in the face and push it off a cliff. He. Must. Die.
- Your Mileage May Vary. Wildly. Wildly. Many players consider the Claptraps to be horribly fucking annoying and fail to understand why Krom's act of shooting a piece of equipment in the ocular lens can be considered even remotely evil.
- A possible Lampshade Hanging of this trope occurs when Patricia Tannis tells the protagonist that their next target, Baron Flynt, stole the last Eridian Artifact and punched her dog.
- As if his "Sound the retreat!" at the Battle of Ostagar weren't enough, Loghain's real Kick The Dog event is having his daughter locked up and threatening to let Howe execute her. Of course, given that this is Dragon Age, a realm far on the cynical side of things, he can still join your team and become The Atoner.
- Soul Nomad And The World Eaters:
- At one point you meet Hawthorne, an influential merchant; his daughter, Tricia, is an archer who joins your party. But then you find out that Tricia is the most recent of about half a dozen "daughters" Hawthorne bought from a child slavery ring, the others all having "disappeared" sometime before their 17th birthdays. Of course, it does make you feel a little better about Hawthorne being killed in front of you. This plotline only gets worse in the Demon Path.
- The Thurists (cultists who worship a World Eater) infect towns with a deadly plague because their "god" tells them to. But the real Kick The Dog moment comes where Kanan reveals that 10 years ago she killed young Danette's parents. Then he laughs about it.
- Levin, whom you originally believe is your ally, attacks Layna, reveals that he's a World Eater and reveals that he killed his sister Euphoria. Then, to add insult to injury, he resurrects Euphoria just long enough to rub in the fact that she was a soulless puppet and Endorph was a chump for falling for her. On top of the shaming and asskicking Gig and company dish out before this insult, he wins the grand prize from Endorph afterward — one Psycho Burgundy to put him to final rest.
- Gamma and Joules' entire Hannibal Lecture, which is followed by their attempt to devour Feinne purely for power.
- 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.
- This game also features a literal version of this trope as Colette kicks a dog after having lost her humanity at the Tower of Salvation. This is not done to portray her as a Heel, but to underscore the fact that her personality as gone, as she is the game's dog lover.
- 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 brutal 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's 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 jerk move, but he later blantantly abuses the rules he's supposed to uphold when he says that now every single player is now Neku's entry fee, so he puts all thier lives on the line, when Neku needs them to even play the Game without getting killed. Is it any wonder he's listed in TWEWY's own entry as a Jerk Ass?
- It's stated in the Secret Reports later that Kitaniji is actually a step below the guy who actually has the power to revive the fallen who win the Game, and was using Shiki's instatement as Neku's entry fee to cover that up. The jerkery still holds about using every other Player as Neku's entry fee for the final week. He's just very fortunate Beat was the only Reaper who didn't have intentions of leaving his ass out to dry.
- Let's not forget Mitsuki Konishi, resident passive-aggressive Baroness. In her chapter, she crushes Beat's cute pet Noise into a pin just minutes before we found out said pet Noise was Rhyme after being Blessed With Suck so that Beat could resurrect her in human form...All with a grin on her face.
- In Final Fantasy VIII, Seifer actually goes and kicks a mongrel the first time he's in the party.
- In Fire Emblem 7, The Vamp Sonia sends her daughter Nino and teenage contract-killer Jaffar to kill the Prince of Bern for Lord Negal. She also gives Jaffar an order to kill Nino, then justifies it Hannibal Lecture style by saying that the Prince's killer must be killed to avoid panic in Bern. Nino and Jaffar don't go through with it, and actually defect to your side after a Quirky Miniboss Squad member runs her mouth about Sonia's plan in front of Nino.
- Even worse was the fact that she just promised Nino that she would hug her, just once, if she finished the mission. Worse still, she kills her foster father and reveals that she killed her entire family of mages when she was a baby, by using her as a human shield. Making her a combination of Adolf Hitler and Lord Voldemort.
- And from the same game, just in case you didn't know that Prince Zephiel's father Desmond was one huge bastard, they show him ordering a baby fox to be killed. A baby fox! A baby fox Zephiel had given to his baby sister Guinevere! And Guinevere was Daddy's favorite!
- Let's not forget that Ephidel, instead of kicking the dog, stabs an old man to death after the other questions him.
- In the John Woo game Stranglehold, Big Bad Mr. James Wong is shown early on to be an utter bastard when he reveals during his meeting with Tequila that he intimidated his own daughter Billie into breaking up with the Cowboy Cop on pain of death eighteen years ago while she was still pregnant with their daughter Teko — and ordering a No Holds Barred Beatdown on Tequila on top of it. Eighteen years later, after charging Tequila with the task of rescuing her and Teko from the Zakarovs and the Golden Kane, Wong decides to stick the knife in by ordering Tequila's own partner Jerry to betray Tequila by murdering Billie after Tequila took out Damon Zakarov and trying to kill him as well, both to protect his syndicate (Damon had threatened to force Billie to reveal everyone on the payroll of her father's syndicate in order to keep Damon from killing Teko) and to deny Tequila the woman he loved forever in true rat bastard fashion.
- Most of the later assassins in No More Heroes enjoy kicking the nearest canine. Since the viewpoint character isn't exactly a friend to all living things, this is probably there to justify the bad guy's eventual gory deaths.
- Number 2, Bad Girl, states that she feels no remorse about killing anyone while slaughtering clones for fun, Number 3, Speed Buster, kills a major trainer in a rather messy manner, and Number 7, Destroy Man, cheats so consistently it's remarkable.
- As a twist, a good bunch do not kick the dog, however. In comparison...
- In Assassin's Creed, every single Templar that you're assigned to kill gets at least one Kick The Dog moment (breaking a test-subject's legs, pushing somebody into a pile of burning books, murdering a priest out of paranoia, etc.) before you kill him.
- Except, of course, for the slave trader. Because do you really need any other reason to kill a slave trader?
- Apparently horrible storage conditions for the slaves, as mentioned on this very wiki. "Even Altair seems vaguely appalled."
- The sequel goes further and gives each of the Templar assassination targets a "Kick The Dog" video profile showing why each is a very bad person (with the tragic exception of Dante Moro). The sequel to that though eschews this, being seemingly content to have Cesare Borgia kill a helpless Mario Auditore, with the subsequent sin of the Borgia regime and troops being guilt by association.
- Oh, sweet Jesus, I get to be the one who mentions this! In Overlord, you have a tower, which, naturally, is your base of operations, housing an armory, a forge, even a private chamber for your mistress. It also features a jester, (a brown in a jester's outfit, kinda like a toned-down Monster Clown,) who will laud your various accomplishments, and whom you can kick in the head. It serves no purpose, has no effect on your corruption meter, and if you do it enough, the jester will cower in fear of your mighty boot, and later comment on how mean you are to jesters. But you are supposed to be an Evil Overlord, and the fact is, the game lets you do some pretty, ughh, heroic deeds. So you need to kick the jester, to prove to yourself that you're still evil.
- In Destroy All Humans 2, Crypto panders to the Black Ninjas by saying that the Furon god Arkvoodle (Or "Darkvoodle," as the ninjas put it) is so evil that he eats kittens for breakfast, and that he's hungry now and wonders if they have any kittens. The Black Ninjas are unimpressed, saying that they eat babies for breakfast.
- In The Bard's Tale, if you decided to adopt the cute puppy that the Bard will show some actual affection for — a Druid stops the group to allow their Griffith to stomp on the dog, breaking the poor thing's spine as it gave a pained cry. A literal Kick The Dog and Player Punch in one swoop.
- Call Of Duty 4 makes it a point to ensure the player won't feel any sympathy for either Khaled al-Asad's revolutionaries or Imran Zakhaev's Ultranationalists. Al-Asad's troops do such pleasant things as mass-executing civilians in broad daylight, publicly executing President Yasir al-Fulani on national television, and detonating a nuclear bomb inside his own city. Zakhaev's Ultranationalists routinely murder civilians, bomb civilian villages indiscriminately, and conduct another mass execution in a village for no apparent reason except to be complete bastards.
- The Ultranationalists murder the civilians because they don't want to take the chance that the civilians will rebel and damage their long-range bombardment equipment. They bombard other villages and targets to try and defeat Loyalist forces. And they perform the second mass execution so that they can use the village to hide Al-Asad without fear of being discovered. Sure, they're all evil reasons, but they're not indiscriminate. Firing the nuclear missiles at the US, now THAT is a Kick The Dog moment.
- Really? whiping out every last one of your own civilians in a 20 mile radius of any point of interest to you (they also kill an old man during a SAS escape mission, for basicly no reason. He had no idea the SAS team was anywhere near him) isn't pointless evil, but trying to nuke your arch-enemy is?
- The announcers in Gradius Gaiden will give you words of encouragement if you run out of lives early on, but later on, they rub your defeat in your face with more disparaging comments:
"Poor boy..."
"Get outta here, forget about it!"
"Hahahahaha!"
- The first thing a minor villain does during his introduction in Fable 2 is kick the player's dog.
- That bit-part bandit is nothing compared to Reaver's puppy-punting spree. Upon his introduction, he kills a sculptor and an artist trying to capture his likeness, sends you off to get your soul drained by {Cosmic Horror ancient demons} so he can stay eternally youthful, kills a character you've known since childhood, and then informs you cheerfully he's just betrayed you to the very person who...dammit, Lucien needs a new section.
- The stories around Lord Lucien in your childhood depict him as a noble, if somewhat eccentric man. In fact, he even offers to adopt you and your sister, both homeless orphans... unless he gets exactly the result he does get from a simple test which reveals that the two of you have the blood of heroes, at which point he shoots your helpless, unarmed sister in the head, and then shoots you in the chest, sending you out a window in a tall tower. You get better. After this point, he becomes a fairly standard Big Bad, but at the end of the storyline he reveals that again, to try to cut off the heroic bloodline, he's personally murdered your spouse and any children you have, and then literally kills your dog when it takes a bullet to save your life.
- Actually, according to the Banshee, he didn't shoot Rose in the head; rather, in the chest, and she didn't die out right away. Oh, no. She had to watch while Lucien shot you, and then Lucien puts another bullet in her head.
- Sometimes when a villager sees your dog, he/she will taunt your dog and then kicks the dog in the face.
- Peter Molyneux has said in interviews that this trope was one of the main purposes of the dog in Fable 2 - the dog is designed to make the player grow attached to him, so attacks against him become the player character's Berserk Button.
- In Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2, Archibald Grims (a recurring enemy character for the first part of the game) merely comes off as a minor Jerkass. It's not until you've fought him a few times that you find out that he actually is a sociopath — his solution to digging up a rumored lost-technology giant robot is to bomb the area, blasting away the sand covering the robot as well as the pesky civilians who were digging it up the hard way. A subordinate even tries to reason with him, and Archibald seems to consider for a moment.
"I see. Yuuki, are you trying to say you don't like unnecessary bloodshed?"
"Not in this situation, Sir."
"What a shame. But I do. Especially from non-combatants!" (Cue maniacal laughter and screamy civilians)
- World Of Warcraft: Choose a Blood Elf in The Burning Crusade, and you're required to kick many dogs (or cats, as it may be.) Play a death knight in Wrath of the Lich King, all you do under the Lich King's control is kick dogs — oh, and kill your best friend.
- Also in the opening cinematic a Blood Elf cuddles with a small magical creature, only to destroy it so she can absorb its mana.
- At the Argent Torunament a woman takes the confessions of champions from both factions. An undead champion informs her that he punched a penguin in the face just so he could see her expression when he revealed it.
- Jade Empire lets you indulge in a little dog-kicking, if you're evil enough. When your karma meter hits rock bottom, the cute little dogs running around in the background become targetable - interacting with them lets you kick them, making them explode, and drops a health power-up.
- Bio Shock does this indirectly in an event that could also be considered a Moral Event Horizon. Dr. Suchong forces the protagonist, Jack, who was a genetically conditioned child in Rapture to snap his new puppy's neck. Jack is mentally conditioned to obey him, even though the child protests profusely. This just demonstrates how much of a huge dick Dr. Suchong was.
- Then there's the fact that he was so abusive with a little girl. I know he was irritated, but he had no excuse for doing what he did. He even said "shit" right in front of her! Shouldn't he know you're not supossed to use foul language when you are near the little ones? At least that resulted in him getting mauled by the Big Daddy. You can even see a huge drill in his belly when you find his corpse.
- For extra dickery, bear in mind how the little girl referred to him as Papa Suchong.
- In the Japanese dub of Mega Man Legends (Dubbed Rockman Dash in Japan), when you reach a scene where you have to get the dog Paprika away from Tron, players have the option of just merely kicking the dog, causing him to scamper away. In the english dub, however, players have the option of "telling" the dog to go away.
- In Planescape: Torment, you get to experience flashbacks to previous incarnations of your character, the Nameless One. One is dubbed the "Practical" Incarnation. Pretty much everything he does is dog-kicking and Moral Event Horizon-crossing. And yet, it's implied that something your original self, the Good Incarnation, did before he repented was so far beyond the Moral Event Horizon that the Practical Incarnation is a near saint in comparison.
- It's the first thing you see the "protagonist" of Postal 2 do after he gets out of his trailer on Monday morning. And then it gets better. It's just that kind of game.
- Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies has a cutscene where the Erusean invaders set up an anti-air gun post on top of a hospital in the narrator's hometown. It also reinforces Yellow 13's Anti Villain status by having him be disgusted by this.
- Saints Row 2. Boss, the character you play, does a lot of this.
- She doesn't kick an actual dog, but give one to her, and Larxene would probably kick it. She does this trope enough, you'd think it was her job.
- All the Organization XIII does this. Everyone from the wimpy pussy Demyx to the complete bastard Xemnas. Xaldin's whole role was to kicking the Beast into despair, Xigbar attempted to snipe Sora's head off for no reason, Vexen had experimented on Living People, Luxord attack the Port Royal with the help of The Heartless and the remnents of Barbossa's crew, Marluxia was so evil that Sora himself showed rage for his cruelty and no remorse when he wasted his pink ass, and then there is Saix.
- Mafiaesque Team Rocket was the lightest villain group in the games, bar none. Whacking a few Mons, running a casino and the Viridian Gym as legitimate business ventures, intermeddling with the Lake of Rage, and hijacking the Goldenrod Radio Tower were pretty big for their day, but compared to more recent organizations they're small fries.
- Much hyped in the continuity is Team Galactic, who slid right up the Sliding Scale Of Villain Effectiveness by bombing Lake Valor, extracting the gems from the Lake Trio, and using the gems to shackle Dialga and/or Palkia in an attempt to rewrite reality. Unfortunately for them, the Mooks are plain dumb, the Lake Valor explosion was pure shock value, and the lion's share of bad intentions come from emotionally stunted Cyrus, who believes that living spirit is an imperfection that needs to be scrubbed away. If it weren't for him, even the Rockets would have someone to laugh at.
- Archie and Maxie must play canine soccer when their groups aren't at each other's throats. Sure, they take their cause a bit too seriously, but what drives them dangerously close to the Moral Event Horizon is their operation at Mt. Chimney. Whatever they planned to do to the global climate does not excuse them from nearly driving Lavaridge City to ruin - the eruption that Team Magma was aiming for would have burned it all away and left multitudes of both humans and Pokemon homeless for years to come, while the death of Mt. Chimney would have financially devastated the city, with the demise of its hot springs as part of the backlash. (Keep in mind this was before Team Galactic was even a concept) In the manga, Archie becomes a professional Poochyena kicker by actually killing Mt. Chimney via his Elite Mooks, one of which he sends off to die for doing his job right later on, and proves to Maxie prior to the Emerald arc that he is indeed Eviler Than Thou after they partly recovered from being used by the Red and Blue Orbs. Still, neither of them hold a candle to...
- Cipher makes Poochyena kicking, if not molestation, its modus operandi. In the events of Pokemon Colosseum, they were literally running all of Orre from the shadows of the criminal underworld, with even its most affable Admin, Miror B., holding the mayor of Pyrite Town around his pinky while distributing Shadow Pokemon shipped from the Under to people at the Pyrite Colosseum. Dakim was the enforcer who put everyone else in line, Venus was the pretty face that kept the people of the Under out of Cipher's affairs with her gaudy entertainment programming, and Ein corrupted the stolen Pokemon that Team Snagem and other criminal organizations paid Cipher as tribute for use as weapons. The place was hell on earth in a near-literal form until Wes waged his two-man war, and five years later during the events of Pokemon XD, changes in personnel aside, Cipher's at it again, and the loss of support from Team Snagem is merely a setback to their greater operations. Say what you will, but any organization with nigh-Complete Monsters comprising the entirety of its cabinet is a Complete Monster itself, bar none - and given the sheer assets Cipher possessed during XD, the possibility of a third coming is very real.
- In .hack//G.U., there's Atoli who spends most of the series as the game's resident dog being kicked by just about everyone in Haseo's rogues gallery. Even Sakaki, who found her on a suicide website and convinced her to play The World rather than kill herself.
- Not just in-game, her real-life self also gets kicked by almost everyone, including her parents.
- Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles manages to turn Alexia Ashford into even more of a Complete Monster than she was before by having her murder Alfred — apparently, simply for not waking her up from cryo sooner... Quite a switch from the original.
- In the God Of War series, Kratos does this a lot, Video Game Cruelty Potential notwithstanding. You can even literally kick Cerberus pups — and in the third game, you can even get an achievement trophy called "Obedience School" for doing this to 50 pups.
- And as assholish as Kratos can be, his enemies are even worse. Ares and Zeus, his primary nemeses in the series, do much to earn Kratos's (and the player's) hatred throughout the games. The other gods are not much better.
- Fassad spends a great deal of his on-screen time in Mother 3 electrocuting the adorable little monkey Salsa.
- In the pre-match cutscene before fighting Saiki in The King of Fighters XIII, Saiki killed Mukai when the latter requests to let him handle the fighters instead.
- Lego Universe has a rather brutal example, upon the rather idiotic creation of the Maelstrom, the first thing the one Spiderling did was crush a puppy with it's leg. It gets repaired though, don't worry.
Webcomics
- A hilarious literal example, from the webcomic Van Von Hunter.
- As soon as the villain, Frans Rayner, of the D.A.R.E To Resist Ninja Drugs and Ninja Violence story arc is introduced, he gets into this trope. It could be seen as his Moral Event Horizon... but they are just mooks who failed him because of Dan McNinja's Incendiary Exponent.
- This is parodied in an 8-bit Theater strip.
- At the end of a Penny And Aggie storyline, Charisma rants to her illegitimate son's face that he exists to ruin her life, after a series of events he had no control over, in front of her boyfriend. Needless to say, he leaves her soon after.
- In Sluggy Freelance Aylee's evil clone gets one of these after she goes through her corporate executive transformation. She attacks the gang's Halloween party and leaves all the guests unconscious outside and taunts Riff with the knowledge that she can kill him and everyone he knows so easily.
- New Knight Templar Xaphrael kicks the dog within his first half dozen strips in Misfile when he nearly chokes resident Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain Cassiel in this strip (for doing her best to get Rumsiel in trouble).
- In Awkward Zombie, the Author Avatar does this literally.
- Kubota from Order Of The Stick has kicked several puppies. He not only orders his men to kill a pregnant woman (which doesn't work that well, but still...), he seals the deal by poisoning and killing his assistant Therkla, just so he can make an effective escape. This last act might even put Kubota into even worse territory.
- Vaarsuvius threatening Elan with death when Elan says that he will not cover up for Vaarsuvius killing Kubota. In addition to suggesting that Elan had an affair with Therkla behind Haley's back. Note that Elan is hir team-mate.
- Belkar constantly complains about not getting to kick any dogs. Although, he does eventually cross the line with his teammates when he kills the oracle. Of course, the oracle, being... an oracle, expected this and used it to pull off a magnificent example of a Xanatos Gambit.
- Very literal instance in General Protection Fault, in one of Trudy's earliest appearances, complete with giggle. This turns out to be one of her nicer traits as the strip progresses.
- Questionable Content. Sven. Not funny, Jeph. Not funny.
- Minions At Work. Well, I don't feel really good about who we stole the candy from but you have to admit... it was easy.
- Misty Snow from Shadowgirls. She was racist at the age of 5, and when she grew up, she became a teenage Queen of Jerkass. Her biggest feat in kicking a dog? She made Lin betray her best friend Becka for popularity, and led her in a trap, but instead of embarrassing her in public, like Lin thought it would end, Becka almost gets raped by three guys. And Misty was meanwhile playing with Lin's guilt, and thinking about it made Fate Worse Than Death even worse.
- And if you think Misty's bad, just wait until she becomes Possessed By Mother Hydra, who surpasses her in kicking a dog like hell. And she has this promo art.
- Several times in Slightly Damned:
- First, we have the as-yet unnamed hooded archer, whose first action in the story is to kill Sakido.
- Shortly afterwards, we're introduced to Lazuli and Talos, two demons who got their kicks out of tormenting Kieri.
- And shortly after that, we learn Kieri's bunny form was a curse from a rabbit spirit (go figure), who did it to her for the lulz.
- And then there's Denevol, who despite being an Angel, has done nothing but kick dogs (and bunnies) since he appeared.
- Mr. Bignose from Tragic Deaths does this quite literally.
- For the first part of RPG World Galgarion comes across as a comical somewhat harmless villain. But as Cerebus Syndrome set in, Galgy got several suprisingly evil moments, including his attack on the Mubble village, the slaughter of a turncoat henchman's family and finally murdering Reka. Some or all of these might count as crossing the Moral Event Horizon as well.
- Nemen Yi, the Chosen of Battles in Keychain Of Creation. When she first shows up, her moral status is indeterminate: sure, she's trying to sequester the group's precious artifact, but it had just been stolen by the villains for world-ending purposes. Then, after one of the team gets it back, the Chosen of Battles looks like she's ready to throw down on the group — until Marena points out that that would be illegal. Fortunately, the conundrum of whether we're supposed to sympathize with Nemen Yi or not is solved in the very very next strip, as she immediately chooses to try and steal the artifact and bait the rest of the group into attacking her first (so she can "defend" herself) by attempting to behead Secret, on the legal technicality that even though she is a defector from team evil and working for the protagonists, she's still an Abyssal Exalted. Going straight for the Woobie's neck just to get around a bureaucratic roadblock in your path is what we call "a signal".
- This strip of LICD has a literal example.
- Khrima from Adventurers, he kicks cute things.
- In Knights of the Old Republic, Darth Bandon attacks a guy as he's walking in to meet Darth Malak, and Darth Malak electrocutes two people for no apparent reason at one point.
- And, of course, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gives us a literal example.
- The Dreamland Chronicles: They told to keep out of trouble, so the guard abuses children before them.
- More or less literally happens in The Q Man when Talbot remotely performs a command override during the Q Man's first mission.
- Richard the Warlock of Looking For Group does this on a regular basis, usually for comic effect.
Web Animation
Web Original
- In the fanfic Kingdom Hearts: The Short and Honest version (found in the fanfic recs/ page) Clayton from Deep Jungle mentions "punting a few puppies off a cliff".
- In the animation Ninjai the bigbad for no real reason what-so-ever attacks the hero's little bird friend. The bird get's his own back though.
- TheSagaOfTuck's Principal Nickerson has no qualms about assigning detention to students who skip class to commit suicide. Just so you know how badly he deserves the Roaring Rampage Of Revenge.
- Survival Of The Fittest character JJ Sturn: This thread. (NSFW
- To summarize: He has sex for one last time with his girlfriend (Rosa Fiametta), then breaks up with her while insulting her. She slaps him, and then he decides to beat the crap out of her while continuing to insult her. He's The Atoner for a reason.
- Aren't we forgetting Cody Jenson? Raped Madeline Shiohara and bit out her neck. How did he feel? He didn't.
- Danya's Establishing Character Moment in the first version was when he was briefing the v1 students with a very... smug tone. Then towards the end mentioned he hated punks, and ordered his minions to kill a student for wearing his hat sideways.
- In the video The Unspeakable Deeds of Bill 42, it's not enough for the character representing the bill to fine people for meeting to air their grievances. He has to up the evil quotient by deliberately knocking over a woman's crutches.
- In a recent episode of Yu Gi Oh The Abridged Series, Marik mentions that he once kicked a puppy. "And it was very cute".
- Actually, that was Bakura (he killed the puppy).
Marik Melvin banned Team Fourstar.
- Wait, wouldn't that be like a Crowing Moment of Heroism for
Marik Melvin?
- Awkward has a fight between Lester and Alex culminate in Alex telling Lester to give up on his relationship with Steph because "everybody knows you're just going to mess it up like last time". Lester doesn't take it well. Later we find out that Ernie dumped Karen, calling her "worthless".
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.
- The first act of "Scott Tenorman Must Die" is one sustained kick the dog moment for Scott, particularly when he makes Cartman beg for his money back, then burns the money in front of him, while boasting that his parents give him a huge allowance. Of course, he doesn't exactly get off lightly.
- In the Great Expectations parody episode, Pip shows Estella a baby bunny and tells her that a heartless person would break its neck. Estella proceeds to break said bunny's neck... and the necks of 26 others.
- 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.
- She actually first appeared (only, no dialog) during the story of how her brother got his scar. During the crowd reaction shot as daddy burns his son's face, a young girl can be smiling, unlike practically everyone else present aside from Zhao, Zuko's established rival.
- 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.
- She also destroyed a sandcastle in The Beach Episode.
- 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.
- Before Mai made her decision she looked at Sokka holding Tom Tom (who was perfectly happy with this). Perhaps she just realised that they weren't going to hurt him?
- 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 that before using a catapult to fire Homer out of town for breaking the law, he's going to test it on 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.
- In the Tree-House of Horror episode where the giant ads all come to life, Marge convinces Homer to return the giant donut to the Lard Lad in order to end the destruction. Lard Lad gets back his donut, smiles at it contently, and then KICKS THEIR DOG IN THE NEXT STATE and walks away down the street smashing the roofs of every house with his giant donut along the way.
- Springfield's own resident evil, Monty Burns, literally punts the dog in Last Exit to Spingfield.
- Not to mention shuts down power to all of Springfield to try to force the striking power plant workers back to work in the same episode.
- Burns has a LOT of these moments. He comes awfully close to literal in "Dog Of Death" when he has Bart's innocent, gentle pet dog strapped to a chair, and shown several images of animal abuse to try to turn him into an Angry Guard Dog.
- Burns once took over all television stations in Springfield, telling them he wouldn't give them back until someone stole Maggie's teddy bear and brought it to him.
- When Homer tried to quit his job at the power plant, but had to retake it after impregnating Marge with Maggie, Burns made a narrow tunnel to his office that Homer had to walk through, and put a sign on Homer's desk that said "don't forget, you're here forever." Almost literally adding insult to injury.
- Burns also sends a vicious Angry Guard Dog after Bart (who was hungry after running away from home) for trying to steal a pie which was left on the window sill. A pie that Burns would have otherwise disposed of ANYWAY.
- There was also the time he tried to make clothing out of the fur of a bunch of small puppies. He is implied to own lots of clothing made from the hide of various animals as well.
- "Homer vs. Dignity" is a full EPISODE of Kick The Dog. Desperate for money, Homer asks Burns for a raise, and Burns instead decides that it's only under the condition that Homer be Burns' personal "prank monkey." These pranks involve a series of increasingly humiliating circumstances Homer is put in, and culminates in Burns dressing Homer in a panda suit and having another Panda rape him. Eventually Homer gets fed up with this and quits, using the money he already had to set up a parade to distribute toys to needy kids; Burns shows up to try to bribe Homer into throwing fish guts instead of presents; Homer is shown contemplating to it, and then it cuts to fish guts being thrown at the kids; but it is revealed that Burns is the one throwing it after all.
- Curse of the Flying Hellfish reveals him and Abe to be the last surviving members of their WW 2 unit, and that a deal was made such that the last surviving member would get to keep a case of art stolen from civilians; Burns hires an assassin to kill Abe, but said assassin is not successful at it. Bart convinces Abe to go get the case anyway, and when Abe and Bart retrieve it, Burns shows up and takes the art at gunpoint. Bart calls Burns a coward, then Burns points the gun at his face; Abe says Burns can take the art as long as he does not hurt the boy. Burns remarks that he would rather do both, then kicks Bart into the empty case and kicks the case into the water. Note that he could have taken the art without drowning the child, he just tried to drown the child anyway for no apparent reason other than that said child insulted him.
- He once developed a project to block sunlight from reaching Springfield, to deprive them of one more alternative source of heat and light. His usually-unquestioning assistant Smithers STRONGLY objected to this, and was fired as a result. A town hall meeting was held about this, and Burns showed up JUST when the whole town was being shown what Burns' oil drilling operation did to Bart's pet dog, who was seen using wheels just to walk down the hallway.
- Homer has a few of these too.
Marge: (suffering from amneisa) You strangle your own child?
Homer: Yeah, but he's cool with it... (looks at Bart shaking his fist) Right?
Bart: (wheezing) It hurts when I swallow...
Homer: Why you little.. (resumes strangling Bart)
- Also, in the first clip show, Homer lands in a coma after Bart pulls a prank on him due to Homer playing pranks on him all that day (Bart hadn't expected him to wind up in a coma). Thinking Homer may die, Bart sadly confesses to the prank. Homer then procedures to wake up....and begin strangling Bart in revenge for the prank.
- Not to mention that before that, Homer's pranks on Bart were pretty mean-spirited. He put duct tape on Bart's eyes (duct tape is the strongest tape available, and the eyelids are the thinnest layer of skin on the body), and he tricked Bart into drinking milk that was sitting next to the furnace for six weeks (so it was so curdled, it might as well have been poisoned). It's a good thing it only happened in a TV show; there's a difference between an April Fool's Day joke and attempted murder.
- 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, kicks Sari out of her home with nothing but the clothes on her back 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.
- Ursula in the wedding scene of The Little Mermaid lays a classic one into Eric's Evil Detecting Dog.
- Not to mention when we're first introduced to Ursula, where she's munching on adorable, terrified little shrimp that squeal in her grasp. * Shiver.*
- 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.
- Mr. Huph, Bob's boss at the insurance company, sees a man being beaten and mugged and thinks nothing of it besides "Let's hope we don't cover him!"
- I Use Antlers in All of my DECORATING! A man who hunts animals for sport would do something that evil!
- 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.
- 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 a disabled beggar (who is hiding the money in his cast and he beats his leg to get to it), 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"!
- Prince John also seems to cross this when he orders Friar Tuck to be hanged as bait to trap Robin Hood. Now, hanging anybody is pretty bad, but Friar Tuck is a man of the church. Even his advisor Sir Hiss seems horrified by this.
- "What makes you think anyone would want a homely little girl like you?" In a sickeningly sweet voice. After trying to get Penny to like her.
- Mina and the Count, a cult favorite from the What A Cartoon show on Cartoon Network had the count carelessly smacking a screeching cat away within the first minute of his introduction. Fortunately, he gets his comeuppance in the most hilarious way.
- Cruella de Vil, villain of Disney's One Hundred And One Dalmatians, has three in one scene. First, she crushes Nanny behind the door as she enters the house. A moment later, she stubs out her cigarette in Anita's cupcake, and follows by flicking ash into her cup of tea.
- Professor Ratigan of The Great Mouse Detective casually kicks, knocks over and generally abuses his mice minions while they're singing about how great he is. Mid-song, he EXECUTES one for calling him a rat, then frightens the rest into finishing the song.
- An episode of Batman The Animated Series, "A Bullet for Bullock," is a Day In The Limelight for Bullock that consists largely of Bullock kicking every metaphorical dog he sees. Prior to this episode he seemed like a sour cop who bent the rules a little too much (although he prided himself on never taking a bribe), but he established himself as an absolutely unsympathetic dick when a reporter offered to help him if he waited a few minutes, and he rummaged through her office instead of waiting.
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force - usually the crap Shake pulls is funny, but he crosses the line when he takes Meatwad's adorable pet kitten and fries it in a microwave. Fortunately all the animals he abused come back from the dead and try to ram him into the microwave.
- In Teen Titans, Starfire's sister tries to frame her for a crime and steal her boyfriend.
- Slade injects the Titans with nanobots to blackmail Robin into being his assistant.
- Control Freak steals James Bond's gadgets, then pushes him off the Eiffel Tower.
- In Mulan, Shan-Yu captures a pair of Chinese scouts (and mockingly congratulates them on finding his army), then lets them go to tell their Emperor he is coming. As they flee, he turns to one of his henchmen, an archer:
"How many men does it take to deliver a message?"
[nocks arrow] "One."
- In the Gargoyles four-parter City of Stone, Gruach is forced into an arranged marriage with Gillecomgain, the murderous Hunter. At one point, Gillecomgain takes a flower and looks at her somewhat wistfully, but then crushes it. Greg Weisman said they were worried we might start to feel sympathy for Gillecomgain being stuck in a loveless marriage, so the flower-crushing was a somewhat manipulative signal that it was okay to hate him. Later, he holds a knife to Gruoch- taking his own wife hostage- to threaten Macbeth. All this made it easy to cheer when he fell to his death shortly thereafter (also a case of Karmic Death, as he'd earlier killed Macbeth's father by throwing him off the same castle wall).
- In the Winx Club, the Trix doe this on a daily basis. They....try to murder Bloom's parents, cripple Galatea, turn Mirta into a pumpkin, commit several acts of attempted murder...Counting all their acts of needless cruelty would make one hell of a drinking game.
- In the Futurama movie The Beast With a Billion Backs, the Robot Devil makes a deal with Bender on the condition that he takes Bender's first-born son. Bender leaves, finds his son, brings him to Robot Hell, and swiftly kicks him into a magma crater. This appalls even the Robot Devil.
- Don't forget the much more literal Robo-Puppy Mistreatment Alert!
- And in a similar vein, the cold open of an episode has the Professor announce that he's taught the toaster to feel love. Said toaster runs up to Bender and starts licking him like a dog, for which it gets backhanded across the room.
- In Clone High, Principal Scudworth frequently kicks the dog. He frequently conducts terrible experiments on (and kills) students. In the final episode, he rigs the prom so he can be prom king (to console himself from having lost the title in his own prom to John Stamos). John Stamos shows up and is awarded the title, but then sympathetically offers the crown to Scudworth. Scudworth then takes the crown, stabs Stamos in the eye with it, and then proceeds to wear it and take the title.
- His villainy is overshadowed by his rival principal in A Shot in D'Arc. They discuss how after last year's basketball game, the rival principal won Scudworth's first-born son, Brian. After discussing the terms of this year's wager (all the while the rival principal's eating a meal), Scudworth asks, "By the way, how is Brian?", to which the rival replies (slurping up some food), "Dee-licious."
- Used in universe in a Daria episode when Daria assures Quinn she shouldn't be scared of the town's "mass murderers, serial killers, torturers, cannibals... puppy kickers."
- Heloise and Lucius on Jimmy Two-Shoes do this pretty much on a full-time basis. Heloise has built prisions that offer the prisoners chances to escape, only to cruelly dash their hopes. Lucius, meanwhile, often forces Samy to do humiliating things for his amusement.
- In Spongebob Squarepants, when Gary swallowed a kitchen magnet and could attract coins, Krabs dragged him around town, continuously injuring Gary with the bombardment of magnetically attracted coins, all the while stealing from people. Finally, when we saw how injured Gary had became, Krabs didn't care and said he looked fine and went to attract a wave of coins before Spongebob arrived. This is actually considered a candidate for a Moral Event Horizon on Krabs' part.
- In Total Drama World Tour, most of Alejandro's actions against other competitors are purely to get ahead in the game. Except for how he eliminated DJ, throughout the episode of his elimination he helped DJ get over his curse just to reveal that he faked the curse removal and DJ is still cursed by animals which causes him to lose the challenge. Considering that said competitor was a Death Seeker of sorts and likely would have eliminated himself soon, this seems to serve no purpose.
- In the Jonah Hex portion of DC showcase, Red (Jonah's curent bounty-waiting-to-be-collected) rides into town drunk and shoots a dog who bothers him. In the literal sense, not the figurative.
- In Around The World With Willy Fog, the villain Transfer is hired by Sullivan to impede Fog's progress and prevent him from completing his trip around the world. At one point, he disguises himself as Detective Dix and slips Rigodón a mickey to prevent him from informing Fog of a change in the departure time of the steamship he's supposed to take. But then when Rigodón and Tico end up aboard the steamship without Fog, he disguises himself as the first mate, accuses them of being stowaways, and spends the passage cruelly working them to the bone. As far as Transfer knows, he's already accomplished his mission of stopping Fog at this point. He's not getting paid to make Rigodón and Tico's lives miserable—he's just a jerk.
- In Season 3 of The Boondocks, eight year old sociopath Lamilton Taeshawn shoots a dog, hammering in how little he cares for anything or anyone.
- Instead of listing the occasions Frollo kicks the dog, try listing the scenes he doesn't do this even once...we'll wait.
- In the season 1 finale of Blinky Bill (The wedding picnic episode), Marcia bites Shifty Dingo.
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