Kick the Dog/Literature

"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 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 Robert Harris' Fatherland, when we first meet the Gestapo, one officer's first act is to shoot a dog in the face. Yeah, they're evil.
 * Dear god, The fate of perhaps the one and only half decent character Mr. Fish, in Hell's Children by Andrew Boland, at the Hands of the protagonist's. And then theirs Acheri’s childhood, which is not work safe, by a long shot.
 * 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.
 * The Lord of the Rings has Saruman consistently doing this to Wormtongue until finally, it backfires magnificently
 * 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 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 Snuff the general attitude towards the goblin race counts as this for many characters who are otherwise perfectly nice people. One of the clearest indications that an apparent thug is actually a Jerk with a Heart of Gold is that he does show some sympathy for them.
 * 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.
 * I would throw in Visser Three in the first book as well. Killing Elfangor wasn't enough, he had to *eat him alive*.
 * 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. While his very young age at the time, and the circumstances around the incident, might suggest that he might not have fully understood what he was doing, the sadistic streak that becomes so obvious later undermines this more sympathetic interpretation.
 * There's also Viserys Targaryen, who actually has a dog kicking moment in every scene he appears in in A Game of Thrones.
 * Don't forget Gregor Clegane raping the daughter of an innkeeper and murdering the innkeeper's son for no reason.
 * Cersei Lannister is less "Kick the Dog" and more "Execute the Direwolf". Not the direwolf that actually did anything, mind you, just the one who happened to be convenient at the time. This also counts as a kick the dog moment for Robert Baratheon, who could have stopped it but didn't, (and later reveals that he was well aware Joffrey was lying,) just because he wanted a break from being a Henpecked Husband.
 * Catelyn Stark has a kick the dog moment when Jon Snow comes to visit a comatose Bran following his fall from a tower, and Catelyn says to Jon "It should have been you."
 * Arguably not a kick the dog moment; Catelyn Stark is not a villain, and she was just being nasty due to sheer grief and her long-standing resentment of Jon, not because she's particularly cruel in general.
 * Sansa Stark has some dog-kicking in relation to her sister, because even though Arya normally gives as good as she gets when it comes to The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry, there are times when Arya is genuinely trying to apologise or comfort Sansa, only to get it thrown in her face for no other reason than bitchy spitefulness. There is also the fact that
 * Tywin Lannister, who is usually the epitome of Pragmatic Villainy, has several pointlessly cruel moments with Tyrion.
 * Ruthless killing and even casual violence is par for the course in this series, so you know that Ramsay and Roose Bolton are exceptionally bad because of their habit of flaying people.
 * 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.
 * Another famous Dickens example: "If they'd rather die then they'd better do it! And decrease the surplus population"
 * In Jonathan Strange & 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  when they quarrel.
 * That's very debatable for anyone who's read Hannibal. Mason Verger surpasses Lecter himself by quite a long way in the Complete Monster department, and this is established in quite an early scene where he  It should be noted that this incident is not tied in any way to his revenge on Lecter, and serves no purpose beyond making you wish the bastard suffers a truly hideous death.
 * 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 simply to avoid any Moral Dissonance for the heroes, or risk them not having an adequate excuse to  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.
 * 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.

""She took ssso long to die little Elvesss. So long it seemed that it would take forever. Would you like to know what we did to her, when The Morgawr gave her to ussss?""
 * Kirtan Loor also does this, as when Corran had finally caught Bossk, the bounty hunter responsible for murdering his father, he had Bossk released under the pretext of "collateral damage", and it's outright stated to the reader that he did this purely out of spite.
 * 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 Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. 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.
 * In order to ensure that we don't sympathise too much with Alaric from the Warhammer 40,000 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.
 * In John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, the "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 . 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 McMaster 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.
 * 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.
 * 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 Misérables 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.
 * In Harry Potter, 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.
 * In Valley of the Dry Bones, a dystopian novel set in 2016 America, we know that society is really going downhill when the book casually mentions parties where the entertainment includes torture-and-snuff child porn. This takes place several pages after comments by law enforcement about the curious recent increase in missing children.
 * In Eclipse of the Sun, Maurice coerces Fr. Andrei into looking at pornography—by threatening to drag a real woman in and rape her if he refuses.
 * In the same book, Maurice gives Fr. Andrei the Sadistic Choice of publicly denouncing his religion or watching three depraved men rape eight-year-old orphan Arrow into insanity.
 * In Count Smokrev's back-story in Father Elijah, as a child, his playmate rejected a sexual advance. In response, Smokrev killed the boy's pet rabbit, right in front of him.
 * Cree Bega of The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara specialises in Kick The Woobie. He forces Elven Prince Ahren Elessedil to watch while The Morgawr devours the minds of an entire ship's crew, and later, during their final battle, smugly informs Ahren of his crush's torture and suicide, then taunts him for being unable to save her. There is no reason for Cree Bega to do any of this, it doesn't serve to advance The Morgawr's plans or his own; no he just likes to hurt people.

"The sea was covered with mutilated bodies. A formidable explosion could not have divided and torn this fleshy mass with more violence. We were floating amid gigantic bodies, bluish on the back and white underneath, covered with enormous protuberances. Some terrified cachalots were flying towards the horizon. The waves were dyed red for several miles, and the Nautilus floated in a sea of blood.."
 * Lolli in Valiant kicks her cat under a train when she gets sick of it's mewing. I imagine she lost a lot of fans at that point.
 * Pierre Brossard, the Villain Protagonist in "The Statement" by Brian Moore, kicks the dog he bought his ex-wife years before in order to force his way back into her affections. By that time though he's already established as a sociopathic Manipulative Bastard.
 * Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo is implied to have destroyed before ships with civilians and military crew, but the act of following with the Nautilus the horrible death of all the unnamed ship’s crew on purpose, without losing any detail, is when Nemo reveals his true villainy.
 * Captain Nemo Kicks The Cachalots in a terrible massacre:


 * In Black Magic Woman, Complete Monster Walter Grobius plays this trope completely literally: upon hearing that his evil plan was completely thwarted, in anger, he requests that a servant buy him a dog so he can kick it to death.
 * The miller in Krabat mistreats the boys. Not all the time, but if he does, he gets mean.
 * In Death: Some of the murderers, being Ax Crazy, Smug Snake, Complete Monster or some combination thereof, have engaged in this. This just makes their comeuppance all the more worthwhile.
 * The title witches of Roald Dahl's The Witches are singularly nasty, what with their scheme to turn little children into mice, but when one of them expresses her reservation about getting rid of all of them, the Grand High Witch disposes of her in nightmarish fashion for daring to say that she is wrong, incinerating her alive with magic.
 * Edith Wharton's terrible story Kerfol tells of a man who suspected his wife of infidelity because she'd given her little dog's collar (a present from him) to a friend. He proceeds to kill the dog, and to kill any dogs she adopts or even shows the slightest kindness to. She begs her friend to take her away, or help her some way, as she fears for her own life. When hubby is found dead later, the friend is put on trial for murder, and the wife testifies that on that night she'd heard barking and howling she would recognize anywhere.
 * Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: Hoo, boy! The Vigilantes have engaged in this! The book Vendetta has them skin John Chai alive. Why? Because he drunkenly ran over and killed Myra Rutledge's daughter and her unborn child, and used Diplomatic Impunity to get away with it! That, and he supposedly represents Yellow Peril! Also, the Vigilantes have forced a number of their targets to strip naked, for no discernable reason other than possibly humiliation. This really kills a lot of sympathy for the main characters!
 * When Thrope's house burns down in the Knight and Rogue Series Michael suggests that someone may have set it on fire as revenge for Thrope kicking their dog. He does try to hurt a dog and a young boy in his first appearance, but it has nothing to do with why he was targeted.
 * Elizabeth Bathory in Count and Countess will casually kill anyone who stands in the way of her attaining power, even her own family members.
 * A Clockwork Orange: Among their other amusements, Alex and his droogs like to run over animals with the cars they steal.
 * You can tell that someone inthe Chalet School series is a true dogkicker when they do something to hurt Joey's Morality Pet, the Robin. For example, Betty Wynne-Davies takes a snarky comment from Fiona McDonald very badly in The Highland Twins at the Chalet School and resolves to get back at her by selling the school out to the Nazis. As the twins are living with Joey at the time, and the Robin is Joey's ward, anything that hurts the McDonald sisters will hurt her and Daisy Venables too. Betty knows this, but doesn't care.
 * You know Pryrates in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is irredeemably evil when he casually in a dinner table grinds a wandering puppy to death under his heel.