Cruella to Animals

For my sweater, there's no better, than authentic Irish setter!

"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. Meat is not merely a valuable source of protein, but it's delicious because an animal died.

Some Evil Poachers are driven more by a hatred of animals (or possibly one particular animal) than profit — especially in cartoons. Will most likely not include Hunting the Most Dangerous Game in case you're wondering.

Not to be confused with Hunting Is Evil, which is where hunting itself is treated as evil (though it can overlap if they're hunting people for food or clothes).

This trope is seldom Truth in Television. Sadists who hurt animals directly tend to move on to hurting people, and people who wear fur or eat meat are mostly not doing so for sadistic reasons. Most animal rights activists 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 Straw Character, though it can be used simply as a Card-Carrying Villain.

A more specific form of Bad People Abuse Animals. Compare Animal Wrongs Group, Fur and Loathing (a common fictional view on fur coats), Enemy to All Living Things, Exotic Entree, Meat Versus Veggies, Straw Vegetarian. Contrast Friend to All Living Things, It's Fake Fur, It's Fine, and Animal Lover.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Although it's only mentioned in a throwaway joke, Shiho of Psychic Squad, 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.

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 except to illustrate just how evil she is.
• EC Comics: In "Half-Baked", in issue #40 of Tales from the Crypt, the owner of a seafood restaurant delights in the suffering of lobsters because he considers them "ugly," a sentiment which prompts his chef to remark "Perhaps... to a lobster... it is you who are ugly, Mr. Dugan!" In a bit of karmic justice, he dies in a flaming car wreck with his body split open.
• Animaniacs: In comic book story "101 Darnations", an Expy of the Trope Namer wants to make a coat of the Warner siblings' fur.

Fan Works

• Better Bones AU: One of Destroyer Deity One-eye's incarnations, all of which have the goal to kill as many Tribe cats as possible, was a human who had an intense hatred for the cats living in the area, who convinced other humans to help kill said cats.

Films — Animated

• Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians is the Trope Namer, though the movie downplays this aspect compared to the book.
• In Chicken Run, Mrs. Tweedy takes sadistic pleasure in killing chickens for her evening dinner, especially those that can no longer produce eggs, and soon plans to turn the rest of them into chicken pies with her newly purchased pie machine for quick profits. In the sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Mrs. Tweedy switches from pies to nuggets and brainwashes chickens to happily walk into the nugget processor, all in the name of revenge against chicken kind and revenue for her pockets.
• In Despicable Me, Gru has a panda skin in his living room. Of course, the panda could have died of natural causes, but that's unlikely.
• The Little Mermaid (1989) introduces a comedic example in the form of an Ax-Crazy chef who gleefully hacks up fish while singing a gruesome little ditty about it.
• Megamind: Megamind sarcastically invokes this trope when announcing to the super-hero Metro-Man he had kidnapped Roxanne:
  "OH! I'm shaking in my custom baby seal leather boots!"
• The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists makes Queen Victoria leader of a secret society of powerful people who eat rare animals to make them extinct and/or show off how exotic a meal they can acquire.
• One of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie's many antagonists is the Cyclops (so named for the circular face visor in his Creepy Old-Fashioned Diving Suit), who captures sea creatures and dries them out to sell as knickknacks at his souvenir shop, Shell City. As expected, he loves his job just a tad bit too much, laughing maniacally at the suffering of his catches.

Films — Live Action

• In 101 Dalmatians (1996) and its sequel, Cruella DeVil's killer fashion sense is implied to expand to other animals, not just dogs, as she gets her goons to steal a beloved rare white tiger from the zoo and turn it into a rug for her room.
• The Last Supper (1996) is about a group of liberal college students inviting over conservative classmates to gradually murder them. One of those is Jason Alexander, credited as "The Anti-Environmentalist".
  "I'm not anti-Earth, I'm pro-Earthling."
• Referred to in the Italian film Fantozzi 2000 where one of the female characters buys a "precious coat made from panda fur.... ", panda that was "clubbed to death with a sledgehammer."
• 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.
  • There's also Regina in the second film, who's perfectly willing to drown Beethoven's puppies...at least until she finds out how much money they're worth.
• 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 (but not really; they're actually served oddly-seasoned supermarket meats).
• In Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Ace gets dragged to a formal affair in Africa, and meets a particularly obnoxious woman in a gratuitous fur coat. Avowed animal lover Ace responds by KOing her husband and draping the bugger over his shoulders.
• In One Crazy Summer, Big Bad Aquilla Beckersted's Establishing Character Moment has him brought a live lobster which he then dumps into a cooking pot with boiling water, followed by placing a stethoscope inside the pot to hear the pained shrieks of the boiling lobster. Even the audience is able to hear the screams.
• In Troop Beverly Hills, the adult leader of the Culver City "Red Feathers" troop, Velda Plendor, is enraged at the Beverly Hills troop winning Day 1 of the final competition. She then notices the Smelly Skunk that chased them to the finish line. The next scene shows her that night by a campfire wearing a skunk pelt like a coonskin hat, implying she killed the skunk.
  Velda: (holding the skunk up by the scruff) You're gonna pay for this. Oh yes you are.

Literature

• Named for Cruella de Vil, the villain of The Hundred and One Dalmatians (the basis for the Disney movie 101 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 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?" That said, when the Extinctionist's leader serves rare fish at a banquet, he expects the vegetarians at the table will willingly go hungry just for an excuse to stab the fish.
• The High Horse, in Graham Masterton's Night Wars, is a particularly squicky example of this trope. He wears a cape of live animals sewn together...and rides three horses stacked on top of each other and fastened by bolts.
• The third Ms. Wiz book You're Nicked Ms Wiz. The antagonist is a Cruella Expy called Mrs Darcy who's leading a ring of kidnapping various cats from the neighbourhood. It's mentioned that everything she wears is made of fur - which really doesn't work out well for her when Ms Wiz casts a spell to free all the animals that made her coat.
• In the Grimms Fairy Tale Thousand Furs, the princess tries to postpone her wedding to her father (yes you read that right) by insisting she must have a coat made from the fur of every animal in the kingdom - not thinking he'd actually do it. When he does she's shocked and horrified - and makes up her mind to flee the castle at once. Though she has no objections about wearing the coat to keep herself warm.
• Joe Pickett: In Below Zero, Joe arrests a hunter nicknamed 'the Mad Archer' who hunts mostly for the pleasure of seeing animals suffer, and will shoot at anything, regardless of whether it is in season (or even if it is a legitimate prey animal). His targets include a golden eagle and a dog. The dog in particular gets the townsfolk so incensed that when Joe arrests him, the Archer begs the sheriff to keep him jail, fearing that he will be lynched if he is released.
• In the Batman short story "Robber's Roost" by Max Allan Collins, the Penguin targets a club where rich people eat endangered animals, intending to both rob them and liberate the rare owls they've captured. When Batman turns up, his sympathies are very much with Cobblepot for once. (He doesn't let him keep the money, but he doesn't insist on it being returned either; it goes to the Humane Society.)
• In Blood Meridian, Judge Holden buys a pair of puppies from a child, walks over to a bridge and throws them in the water below, where another member of the gang shoots them as they drown. All while the child is watching, of course.

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.
• Not animal suffering (except that humans are animals), but on Scrubs, some of Elliot's makeup is made of baby foreskins. Oddly, this is a case of Truth in Television for many cosmetics, even cruelty-free ones because PETA doesn't care about people.
• 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 averted this in one song, 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 wouldn't buy a real green dress because that's cruel.

Tabletop Games

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness: Subverted. While the Mad Scientist Doctor Feral sounds like he should be the poster boy for this trope, the gamebook goes out of its way to state he isn't cruel he just has a strange sort of view of the world where he sees anything non-human as either a tool or as a candidate for experimentation and is noted for being "extremely polite" even to his vivisection victims!
• Warhammer 40,000: While wearing the skin of your enemies is a common fashion statement, it's most prevalent among Chaos forces and the Dark Eldar. Among them, a certain Kruellagh the Vile, known as "da skinna" by the Orks...

Theatre

• Of course, Cruella de Vil, whom the trope is named for, who appears in Children's Party at the Palace. However, she doesn’t wear her usual fluffy fur coat, but a dress and cloak that look like they are made from the fur of a Dalmatian and a zebra.

Video Games

• Impossible Creatures has Velika La Pette, a woman who wears tiger, cheetah, and zebra furs at the same time. Her interest in the Sigma tech is to create hybrids with interesting patterns to kill them for fashion purposes.
• In Beneath a Steel Sky, set in a dystopian future, Corrupt Corporate Executive Lamb wears a coat made of beaver fur. From the world's last ten beavers.

Webcomics

• 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.
• A straw-omnivore Hate Sink character from Vegan Artbook wears a wolf-skin hat just to show how much she hates wolves.

Web Original

• Played for Laughs in Dragon Ball 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.

Western Animation

• Gotcha Grabmore, a recurring villain on Tiny Toon Adventures, tried to make beauty products from whales. For some reason she talked like Zsa Zsa Gabor.
• You'd think Captain Planet would be all over this trope like a Hurricane of Puns, but it didn't do this all that often. When they did venture into this territory, the usual character they would use was Looten Plunder—and even he was more interested in money than anything else.
• The Simpsons
  • Mr. Burns in the episode "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", which was directly inspired by Cruella de Vil, the villain of 101 Dalmatians.
  • Burns again in "The Old Man and the Lisa", in which 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.
    Krusty: Yep, I'm a real class act.
  • Cletus Spuckler the Slack-Jawed Yokel of all characters borders on this in "Yokel Chords" when he takes advantage of his children's musical success by purchasing outrageously lavish items like a live dog embroidered in gold.
  • Exaggerated in an episode of The Itchy & Scratchy Show, an evil looking old woman, resembling a fatter version of Cruella, buys the fresh and bloody skin of Scratchy the cat, off the Itchy, the show's villain to wear. Scratchy wasn't just a cat, but a humanoid sapient being that was literally just shopping at the mall with the other humans and his skin even still had his White Gloves on it!
• Dexter's Laboratory - The villainess Peltra of the eponymous episode from "Dial "M" For "Monkey". She collects pelts from animals all across the galaxy. Downplayed somewhat in that value does seem to be at least somewhat of a factor, since she flips out when Honeydew ruins Monkey's pelt by covering him in paint.
• Pound Puppies (1980s) - Katrina Stoneheart 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.
• 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.
• In YooHoo & Friends, one of the crimes committed by the Nasty Corp executives when they were human was dining on endangered eagle, then picking their teeth with ebony toothpicks and throwing the toothpicks out of their private jet.
• The Earth Queen from The Legend of Korra is revealed to hate animals...though she has allergies to animal fur (like from Oogi), somewhat justifying it. But then it's revealed she loves eating endangered animals' meat and rumored to have eaten her father's pet bear, Bosco.
• In the Toxic Crusaders episode "A Sight for Sore Eyes", Tromaville's corrupt mayor Max Grody complains that every time he goes to the Toxic Crusaders' home, he ruins another pair of shoes made from an endangered species.
• The Patrick Star Show: Parodied in "10 & 1 Toilets". The Stars' pet toilet Tinkle has puppies, which GrandPat wants to disassemble to revive his line of toilet-themed fashion.

---