The Spanish court’s decision introduces an unprecedented recognition of the animal’s role within the relational system of gender-based violence.
A recent Spanish ruling sentenced a man to twelve months and one day of imprisonment for throwing his ex-partner’s puppy off a cliff. The decision, handed down on 24 September 2025, is notable for recognising the conduct not only as the offence of mistreatment and killing of an animal, but also as a form of indirect gender-based violence (“violencia vicaria”) against the woman.
The case at hand: an instrumental act of relational violence
Last September, an eighteen-year-old resident of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria contacted his ex-partner, threatening to kill the four-month-old Podenco they had shared and then to take his own life. Having reached the agreed meeting place, before the woman’s horrified eyes, he carried out the death threat made against the dog by throwing it off a cliff. As noted in the operative part of the judgment of conviction, the animal’s death was used as a vehicle for inflicting “the greatest psychological harm” on the woman, since the killing of the dog became the instrument chosen to strike the victim indirectly in her emotional and affective sphere. The judge, Auxiliadora Díaz, classified the offence as “violencia vicaria a través de un animal de compañía” — that is, vicarious violence through a companion animal — recognising that the act of cruelty was not an end in itself but instrumental to the exercise of control and dominance over the ex-partner.
The ruling stressed that this was not “a mere concurrence of events”, but rather a “specific purpose: to kill the animal in order to break the woman psychologically”, thereby giving weight to the relational and punitive dimension of the act. The conduct was accordingly framed as a form of vicarious gender-based violence, in which the violence is not directed physically against the woman but is carried out through a third party — in this case the companion animal — in order to cause her pain and suffering. The case file showed that the young woman suffered psychological trauma of particular intensity as a result of the loss of her dog, a circumstance that made a course of therapeutic treatment lasting approximately ninety days indispensable.
The sentence imposed — twelve months and one day of imprisonment, together with a two-year prohibition on approaching the victim — was nonetheless suspended, given the absence of any prior criminal convictions against the defendant.
Criminological reflections
Beyond its strictly legal aspects, the case offers points of particular interest from a criminological perspective, especially in relation to power dynamics and indirect forms of aggression within intimate relationships. The killing of the animal does not represent an isolated act of cruelty, but rather an instrumental behaviour embedded in a dynamic of coercive control: the suffering inflicted on the woman stems from the deliberate destruction of a significant emotional bond, used as a vehicle for intimidation, punishment and the reassertion of dominance.
The criminological literature identifies the separation phase as a moment of particular vulnerability, during which the violent partner may intensify aggressive conduct in order to re-establish lost power. From this perspective, targeting children or, as in this case, a companion animal takes on a relational and symbolic function: it means attacking what the victim loves, undermining her emotional equilibrium and generating a trauma capable of extending beyond the material act.
An evolving legislative framework: vicarious violence and companion animals
An interdisciplinary group of jurists, criminologists, psychologists and sociologists has urged the Spanish Government to extend the concept of vicarious violence to harmful conduct directed at companion animals where it is intended to cause suffering to the partner. This reforming impulse has also been fuelled by cases that have shaken public opinion, such as that of José Bretón, who in 2011 killed his two children in order to strike at the wife from whom he was separating.
Recent amendments to the Spanish Criminal Code (Código Penal) and Civil Code (Código Civil) show a clear trend towards the recognition of a relational paradigm of violence, in which an attack — including one on a domestic animal — is understood as an instrument serving the emotional subjugation of the primary victim.
The animal victim between reification and dual victimisation
The ruling under analysis also opens a space for reflection on the role of the animal as victim. In this, as in other dynamics, the companion animal is reduced to an object, a res over which to exercise power, revenge or intimidation: a means of striking at the person, rather than a subject bearing an interest of its own.
Such reification reveals a dual victimisation: the animal is the primary victim of the harmful act and, at the same time, a functional victim within a strategy of coercion directed against the partner. Human and non-human animals alike, fragile victims of the same abuser: one who, incapable of forming authentic bonds, turns affection into an instrument of dominance. To strike the animal is thus to strike the person, completing that dual victimisation which makes the one the means of wounding the other.
