Cruella to Animals



""Beauty is only skin deep. My beauty, your skin.""

- Gotcha Grabmore, Tiny Toon Adventures

Someone who delights in animals suffering when used to make food and clothing from them. Someone who prefers any product which required an animal to die. Fur is not for warmth, style, or just enjoying how it feels, it's because they know innocent creatures died for it. Or if makeup is tested on animals, it's not better because of any supposed advantages to the testing, but because these people know that their hair spray has also hurt innocent creatures.

Some Evil Poachers are driven more by a hatred of animals (or possibly one particular animal) than profit—especially in cartoons.

This trope is not really Truth in Television. Sadists tend to hurt animals directly, and tend to move on to hurting people. People who wear fur or eat meat are not doing so for sadistic reasons. Most animal rights activists likely don't believe this is true either, as they bank on people's compassion in many of their campaigns—not that that stops them invoking this trope in said campaigns.

A Sub-Trope of Strawman Political, though it can be used simply as a Card-Carrying Villain.

Compare Animal Wrongs Group and Fur and Loathing (a common fictional view on fur coats), Enemy to All Living Things, Exotic Entree.

Contrast Friend to All Living Things, It's Fake Fur, It's Fine.

Anime and Manga

 * Although it's only mentioned in a throwaway joke, Shiho of Zettai Karen Children, who's a psychometer who can read the memories and feelings of objects she touches, mentions that she finds the fear and suffering of whatever meat she's eating to be the best spice.
 * Played for Laughs in Dragonball Z Abridged, where Princess Snake, voiced like that other Snake, comments how she loves her fur coat, especially since she killed all the animals for it herself. With her bare hands of course.

Comic Books

 * In Wolverine #18 (2011) the villain Jade Claw is introduced being served by beefcake men, using a servant as table and with the following food: "Dinner is served, Madame. Cantonese noodles with seared hummingbird hearts and caramelized butterfly brains. Grilled bull elephant tongue with shitake mushrooms and bald eagle hollandaise. Curried Tyrannosaurus Pate, imported fresh from the Savage Land. Baby Seal Soufflé a la mode. And Bacon wrapped tiger eyes sautéed, as always, in the tears of your enemies." . The "dinner" starts out ridiculous, goes on to involves mostly very endangered species and serves the plot not for a single inch.
 * A rather ghoulish example happens in one Spider-Man story, where a gangster's wife brags about her new coat, which she believes was made from Tigra's pelt. Her husband seemingly convinced her that he had killed and skinned Tigra, although everyone present at the event realized he was a Bad Liar trying to make himself look big.

Film
""I'm not anti-Earth, I'm pro-Earthling.""
 * The 1995 film The Last Supper was about a group of liberal college students inviting over conservative classmates to gradually murder them. One of those was Jason Alexander, credited as "The Anti-Environmentalist."


 * Rugrats in Paris: Coco herself qualifies as one of these.
 * Referred to in the Italian film Fantozzi 2000 where one of the female characters buys an " precious coat made from panda fur.... ", panda that was "clubbed to death with a sledgehammer."
 * In Beethoven, you'd think there would be better and easier ways to test a new type of explosive handgun round, but the villain seems to take a perverse pleasure in using dogs.
 * In The Freshman, an underground restaurant serves jaded gourmands meals which are specifically  made from endangered species. While actual suffering on the animals' part isn't guaranteed, the diners pay extra when assured the animal they're eating is the Last of His Kind.
 * Gru has a panda skin in his living room. Of course, the panda could have died of natural causes, but that's unlikely.
 * The Pirates in An Adventure With Scientists makes leader of a secret society of powerful people who.

Literature

 * Named for Cruella de Vil, the villain of The Hundred and One Dalmatians (the basis for the Disney movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians). In the book, she drowns any kittens her cat bears, and she only keeps her cat alive for the money the cat is worth (pedigree, but the kittens are fathered by alley cats).
 * Esme Squalor, a Fashion Victim Villain from A Series of Unfortunate Events, has a fur coat specified to be made from animals killed in particularly nasty ways (although she probably didn't create it herself).
 * The Glove of Darth Vader is all over this. Trioculus takes a break from pursuing our heroes to hunt animals.
 * The Extinctionists in the sixth Artemis Fowl book, The Time Parodox, act like this. They are described as haters of animals that they feel are useless to humans, and they wear expensive fur coats and other animal skin clothing. In a novel twist, some are described as hating animals so much that they are vegetarians and will not eat animals. "How could I sully my body by ingesting such a disgusting creature?"
 * The High Horse, in Graham Masterton's Night Wars, is a particularly squicky example of this trope (then again, it's Masterton). He wears a cape of live animals sewn together...and rides three horses stacked on top of each other and fastened by bolts.
 * The Neil Gaiman short story "Sunbird" follows a society of epicureans that pursues only the rarest meals. They don't seem to delight in suffering, but do take pride in the fact that they may be eating something right off the face of the earth.

Live-Action TV

 * The two stars of Absolutely Fabulous did a video where they portrayed women who wear fur as outright bloodthirsty.
 * Mimi from The Drew Carey Show probably doesn't like animal suffering per se, but in one episode she insists that any cosmetic product she uses has to be "strong enough to blind a rabbit" when somebody challenges the use of an animal-testing brand.
 * The Endangered Species Club from The Goodies episode "Dodonuts". They only hunt endangered species because their small numbers make them hard to find. Common species of animals and birds are too abundant and therefore too easy to hunt.

Music

 * Barenaked Ladies avterted this in "If I Had $1000000", where they sing about how if they had a million dollars, they'd buy a fur coat—but not a real fur coat, that's cruel. Of course, they also say they would also buy a green dress, but wouldn't buy a real green dress because that's cruel.

Tabletop Games

 * Caym, demon prince of animals, and his servants in In Nomine Satanis Magna Veritas. He's absent from the American version In Nomine.

Web Comics

 * Alexa from Shape Quest, who is a scientist for the military.
 * Inverted in Bob the Angry Flower, somewhat inevitably when a story focuses on an Omnicidal Maniac sentient plant. In his more moderate days Bob has discovered Vegans to be psychotic haters of all plantkind.

Western Animation
"Krusty: Yep, I'm a real class act."
 * Gotcha Grabmore, a recurring villain on Tiny Toon Adventures. For some reason she talked like Zsa Zsa Gabor.
 * Captain Planet should be all over this trope like a Hurricane of Puns, but it only rarely covers this. Looten Plunder had a couple episodes, like poaching elephants.
 * The Simpsons
 * Mr. Burns in the episode "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", which was directly inspired by Cruella de Vil, the villain of One Hundred and One Dalmatians.
 * Burns in the episode where he makes recycling evil. By using plastic soda rings as fishing nets.
 * Even Krusty isn't above this. One episode has him don a coat made from a panda, boots made from its cubs, and mittens made from monkey heads.


 * Dexter's Laboratory - The villain Peltra from the episode "Dial "M" For "Monkey". She collects pelts.
 * Pound Puppies - Katrina Stoneheart from the 1980's cartoon was a blatant ripoff of Cruella De Vil. She, too, wanted to make a fur coat out of the title dogs, and even had a fantasy sequence where she imagines herself dressed in a fur coat made from patches of the main characters' fur.
 * Megamind: "OH! I'm shaking in my custom Baby Seal Leather Boots!"
 * In The Secret Saturdays episode "The Return of Tsul 'Kalu", Doyle has to protect a black marketeer who not only illegally sells cryptids but who also eats panda dumplings.
 * In an episode of The Angry Beavers, Norb and Dag are dared to introduce themselves to 100 "unfriendly" people...furriers at a Fan Convention for people who like wearing fur, also featuring traps and such for those wishing not only to wear fur coats but actually make them.
 * Baron DeKlau in a few episodes of the Ace Ventura: Pet Detective series, with a touch of Aristocrats Are Evil.