It happens that you scroll through your feed and stop on a video that you didn’t want to see. An animal in pain, someone filming instead of intervening, the comments that accumulate underneath in a mixture of anger and impotence. You close the app, move on with your day, but that feeling remains there, stuck to you like a thought you can’t finish. And the question that always comes back is the same: do the Italian laws work on this?
The answer, about a year ago, has become a little more complex. The Brambilla law on animals, n. 82 of 6 June 2025, which came into force on 1 July, changed something real in the Italian legal system. He increased penalties, he shifted the point of view of law, he recognized that an animal is not just a sentimental backdrop onto which to project human emotions. But it also left open some questions that jurists and activists continue to raise with growing insistence, and which are worth understanding fully.
What has law n. changed? 82 of 2025
The law modified Title IX-bis of the Penal Code, and did so in a way that is not just technical. The traditional reference to “feeling for animals” has been overcome: criminal protection focuses directly on the animal itself, on its physical integrity and its capacity to suffer. It is a change of perspective that is worth more than what can be read between the lines of a press release: it means that the legal system has stopped, at least on a criminal level, treating the issue as a matter of wounded human sensitivity, to recognize that the animal has a value in itself.
Penalties have been significantly toughened. The killing of an animal is today punished with imprisonment from six months to three years and a fine ranging from 5,000 to 30,000 euros. When the act involves torture or causes particularly serious suffering, it can lead to up to four years in prison and up to 60,000 euros in financial fines.
Mistreatment has also been significantly strengthened, with penalties of up to two years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros. These are numbers which, on paper, represent a clear leap compared to the previous situation and which have led several commentators to speak of an epochal turning point in the protection of animals in Italy. The reality, as often happens, is a little more complicated than that.
Article 131-bis, suspended sentences and difficult investigations
The first critical point concerns a technical instrument of the Criminal Code that non-experts know little about, but which has enormous weight in real trials: article 131-bis, which allows the judge to declare the “particular tenuousness of the fact”. In essence, the crime is ascertained, but if the conduct is deemed to be of little seriousness, the accused is not punished. During the parliamentary process of the reform there was concrete discussion of excluding this instrument from crimes against animals, of closing that door. The final text did not.
Then there is the question of actual prison. Even with the new, more severe penalties, the vast majority of sentences under the law fall below four years of imprisonment, which is the threshold beyond which detention becomes more concrete and difficult to avoid. Below that threshold, sentences can be suspended or replaced with alternative measures to imprisonment.
For a significant part of the critics, this reduces the deterrent effect of the law substantially, because those who commit mistreatment have a good chance of never seeing the inside of a cell. It is no coincidence that, during parliamentary proceedings, various animal rights associations had asked for specific aggravating circumstances for repeat offenders, higher minimum sentences and the obligation to confiscate the animals involved in mistreatment. Almost none of these proposals made it into the final text.
Added to this is a structural contradiction that some jurists have forcefully highlighted: on a criminal level, the reform recognizes direct protection for animals, linked to their capacity to suffer. From a civil law perspective, however, animals are still classified as goods belonging to the owner, property objects to all intents and purposes. This paradoxical situation is not just theoretical: in a criminal trial the animal is a protected subject, in a civil case it is still treated like a table or a car. A truly coherent reform, according to many experts, should also have intervened on this front.
Some areas that were discussed during the parliamentary process remain outside the text, including specific rules on zoorasty and zoopornography. Today these behaviors are punished only when mistreatment of the animal can be demonstrated, leaving room for interpretation which according to several criminal lawyers could create concrete application difficulties in real cases.
Finally, on a practical level there is the crux of the investigations. Crimes against animals require veterinary checks, technical tests and rapid interventions. Without adequate investigative resources and specialized personnel, many proceedings stop before reaching a conviction.
The story of the mistreated dog in Rome, in the Don Bosco neighborhood at the beginning of March 2026, is the clearest demonstration of this: the mistreatment of animals was already a crime before the Brambilla law, yet the intervention of the authorities required months, witnesses, videos and public mobilization. No law, no matter how well written, produces real results if the system that should apply it does not have the tools to do so promptly.
The Brambilla law remains an important reform, probably the most significant in recent years on the subject of the criminal protection of animals in Italy. It has shifted the point of view of the legal system, it has recognized that the animal has a direct legal value linked to its capacity to suffer, it has increased the penalties in a concrete way.
All true, all right. All written in a text which however leaves open the door of the tenuousness of the fact, does not touch on civil law, does not finance veterinary investigations and does not force anyone to confiscate the mistreated animal. A serious reform, in short, with some oversights strategically placed in the points where it would have cost the most. The Italian Parliament, when it comes to animals, always manages to be moved at the right moment, but when the operational rules are written it disappears.
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