Big Bad Pet

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A Giant Mook that's usually an animal, or any non-human (commonly referred to as a "creature") for that matter, who is kept by the Big Bad as a pet.

Often too large or wild to be in the Big Bad's main quarters, the Pet is usually kept in a cage, cavern, dungeon, or any other secluded place. The Big Bad Pet's job is usually to guard the Big Bad's lair, or to viciously consume the hero once the latter is thrown in a pit of death. It's usually too dumb to actually be given orders, so it sort of serves as a Personal Mook for the villain.

To elaborate, Big Bad Pets are, well, big and bad. They usually are composed of dragons, snakes, sea monsters, giants, lions, bears, big hungry dogs, sharks, giant man-eating plants, and the like. They're the creature version of The Dragon, only usually much larger and of savage nature. Thus, they usually don't get that much character other than growling about to frighten the protagonists.

Examples of Big Bad Pet include:

Comic Books

• Issue 9 of I Hate Fairyland has the antagonist Bart of the Blackness who threatens to feed Gert to his large and apparently tame pet snake Mr. Slitherington, who appears more than happy with this arrangement.
• The Dragon to Doom Patrol villain the Brain is Monseur Mallah, a super-intelligent, talking gorilla. Also his boss' boyfriend. (Yep, you heard that right, these two were the first openly LGBT couple in comic books.)

Film

• Jabba the Hutt kept a pet rancor in Return of the Jedi. (Wookieepedia says that its name was Pateesa.)
• In the animated film, Inside Out, Hero Antagonist dream guards put trespassers into the Dream Studio in the inner subsconscious, where Jangles the Clown is locked. Jangles in real life is revealed to be a failed actor who went to drama school, but at Riley's birthday party, he gave her a phobia of clowns. Sadness and Joy release Jangles to disrupt Riley's dream and wake her up, so as to return to headquarters.

Literature

• Bill Sikes kept his attack-dog Bull's-eye by his side for most of Oliver Twist. Bull's-eye was shown to be vicious, and helped add to Sikes' menacing nature.
• While not a "Big Bad" by any stretch, Hagrid Kept a number of dangerous beasts throughout the Harry Potter series, some of which would fall into this category.
  • Fluffy, a large, three-headed dog is used as a guard dog in Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone due to it attacking people indiscriminately .
  • Aragog the giant in The Chamber of Secrets meanwhile serves as more of a "pit of Death" variety, as he and his numerous offspring will happily devour anyone approaching their nest in The Forbidden Forest.
• In Sherlock Holmes, this happened a few times:
  • "The Speckled Band" is revealed to be a snake that was trained to attack anyone sleeping in a particular room that was connected to Blackwood's chamber. Blackwood used the snake to kill one daughter and planned to murder another. Sherlock used a whip to send the snake into a panic and back down the passage, where it bites and kills Blackwood instead.
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles reveals that the titular hound is this. Not a ghost, not a monster, but a hound that was trained to hunt down people in the moors. Once Watson shoots it, he and Holmes realize that the Big Bad Stapleton coated the dog in phosphorus to make the poor canine look scarier in the dark.
• Ray Bradbury paid homage to Sherlock with the Hound in Fahrenheit 451, a programmable robotic attack dog that is a Super-Persistent Predator when set to hunt down a fugitive. While Montag is lucky to escape the Hound alive, the readers in the forest reveal to him that the Hound is trained to go after a random passersby instead and pass them off as the fugitive in question.

Western Animation

• In the Pinky and The Brain Star Wars parody featuring all of the Animaniacs crew, Flabby as a stand-in for Jabba has a monster in a pit. It ends up being Baloney the dinosaur when Yakko and Chicken Boo as Yak Soho and Chewbooboo shoot their way out after failing to deliver pizza on time. Anyone who encounters Baloney screams in terror.

Real Life

• Creatures used in the Roman circus generally fit this bill according to Listverse, as they were used in public executions. Hungry lions, that were trained to eat human flesh, would go after the condemned prisoners within the arena. One particularly cruel form of entertainment was strapping people naked to a seesaw, and the lions would go after anyone still unlucky to be on the end that was on the ground.