SWe are the day after the first National Veterinary Prevention Day. In our country we are increasingly talking about the ‘One Health’ approach which recognizes the interconnection between the health of animals, people and the environment. In 2025, a law was approved (Brambilla Law, 82/2025) which recognizes dogs and cats, bears and wolves as sentient beings, increasing the penalties and types of crime against them. Step by step, slowly and without sparing any stumbles, our country is changing. He tells it The new Legambiente report No more green hill. Towards an Italy that sees suffering. Data in hand, the report takes stock of criminal proceedings for crimes against animal sentiment. And it retraces 44 symbolic stories of cruelty that have marked the country. Stories we shouldn’t forget. This is always the value of memory: remembering to have the tools to recognize and report. So that it never happens again.
No more Green Hill. Legambiente remembers the 44 stories of violence against animals that changed Italy
Emblematic the Green Hill case (2012), the beagle breeding in Montichiari (BS) where almost 3 thousand dogs were “produced” for experimentation. A symbolic case because, for the first time, a Supreme Court ruling recognized the psychological and ethological suffering of animal victims, in addition to the physical one. But the affair also opened a crack in administrative controls. Slow but determined civic pressure exposed an opaque system that had functioned unhindered for years. After years of legal battles and protests, the management of the farm was finally convicted, mainly for animal abuse and violation of regulations.
In Legambiente’s summary there is thekilling of the Amarena bear in Abruzzoon the night of August 31, 2023: a mother well known to the guides of the National Park, hit by a bullet while she was looking for food for her little ones. He wasn’t running, he wasn’t threatening. She was in a neutral position, on all fours, in a daily gesture familiar to those who knew her.
A demonstration against mistreatment in Gree Hill. (Photo by Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images)
From the cow Doris to the dog Aron, Towards an Italy that sees suffering
And there is the story of Circus Martin which in Arzachena, in the autumn of 2014, staged as attractions exhausted animals, poorly and poorly fed, confined in enclosures that denied even the possibility of turning around. The seizure ordered by the Prosecutor’s Office was the largest in the Italian history of circusesopening up the back room of the show. Nine years later, the Court of Tempio Pausania sentenced those responsible to four months’ imprisonment, in addition to the payment of court costs, compensation to the civil parties and a provisional amount of five thousand euros. A conviction that records the existence of mistreatment, but which in its extent reveals how little Italian law still knows how to measure the violence that causes animal suffering.
And there is also the story of Doris cow (2006) who, at the Cuneo livestock market, was tortured with a tractor shovel and then with an electric baton: even to the breasts and the ano-genital area. In 2015 the Court of Cassation confirmed a ruling which led to the final ruling condemnation of the six defendants who had it tortured on the way to the slaughterhouse.
There’s the story of the dog Aronthe young pit bull found tied to a pole in Via delle Croci, in the center of Palermo, while the fire devoured him and he was still breathing.
Stories, in short, that force us to delve into our recent memory, so as not to forget what, as human beings, we have been capable of inflicting. But also exemplary cases, each of which marks a moment of collective awareness, and a before and after along the path towards a new assumption of responsibility.
Proceedings against animals, because convictions are not reached
The numbers arriving from the judicial side are generally worrying and explain why, from a procedural point of view, justice gets stuck. From 2011 to 2017 there were only 850 convictions per year, compared to an estimated average of 5,600 proceedings per year. This is because 70% of the cases were against unknown persons and, therefore, archived. 30% saw the start of criminal proceedings. But then over 50% were archived with different reasons: from lack of conditions to non-attributability, from prescription to other reasons for dismissal and for request for dismissal on the merits (criminal irrelevance, tenuousness of the fact, unexpected fact, unfoundedness of the news).
How to report animal abuse
The report analyzes the regulatory critical issues to be overcome for real animal protection. But then it also invites to make a difference as individuals: opening our eyes to the contexts and situations of potential animal abuse. By documenting, without intervening directly, through
photos and videos, time, date and location of any suspicious event.
You can then contact the Nearest Legambiente club or write to [email protected] Legambiente members, volunteers and activists can use the app for free Gaia Observer, available for Android and iOS to take, save and share photos with time, date and geographical coordinates.
What the 2025 Brambilla Law does not consider: wildlife and livestock
Among the objectives of the dossier is that of insist on some issues that the 2025 reform of the Criminal Code did not consider all the way. Like those that concern the wild species. These animals, even at risk of extinction, are currently, according to Legambiente, without effective and proportionate criminal protection from poaching and illicit trafficking. Protection which is instead provided for by the European directive that Italy must implement by next May. Just think that the most serious type of poaching foreseen by current legislation, i.e. the killing of the Marsican brown bear, only provides for a fine of 4 thousand to 10 thousand euros. Hence the need, according to Legambiente, for the introduction of autonomous crimes for poaching, poaching and trafficking of protected species.
But they need more protections also for so-called livestock animals: we need to implement real standards of well-being. Starting with the elimination of cages on farms.
Education projects on relationships with animals
Lastly, but centrally, on the public services front, in the educational field it is essential to start cultural and educational prevention paths. The objective is to reach, within five years, at least 10% of the young population in a situation of educational and social vulnerability with specific paths dedicated to the relationship with animals, the development of empathic skills and the prevention of violence in relationships.
On the health services front, it is necessary reverse the loss of veterinary doctors in the National Health System. Here the objective is to double the veterinary medical staff and related public structures by 2035, to guarantee an effective public service, starting from the most economically and socially fragile territories.