Dog fighting, funds secured for rescued animals: finally a concrete step forward
CommentiThere is a premise that should underpin every budget law, a way of thinking that goes beyond budget lines and individual provisions: how should our public resources be distributed? This question matters even more when some people are left to pay out of their own pockets for the consequences of violence perpetrated by others. From this perspective, paragraphs 847 and 848 of Article 1 of Italy’s 2026 Budget Law tell a story that is small in financial terms, but significant in principle.
The two provisions, introduced through an amendment put forward by Senator Anna Bilotti (Five Star Movement), allocate €1 million per year in 2026 and 2027 to cover the costs of caring for and housing animals seized or confiscated because they were used in animal fighting. This is not merely a budgetary detail. For the first time, dedicated public funding recognises that behind every dog rescued from a blood-soaked fighting arena lies a cost—social, behavioural and veterinary—that someone must bear in order to alleviate, as far as possible, these animals’ physical and psychological suffering. Until now, that someone has almost always been organisations in Italy’s third sector, left to act as a social shock absorber for the cruelty of a few, given the difficulties faced by public authorities in shouldering these costs.
Dog fighting is not some “folkloric” remnant of a bygone era. It is a criminal business, rooted in illegal gambling and organised violence, and widespread across the country—not just in southern Italy. It is an economy built on brutality and death, sustained by the same logic that has long governed the exploitation of animals’ bodies: reducing a sentient being to an object to be used and discarded and, in this context, weaponized to attack others, while rendering the animal completely submissive to the human who controls nearly all of that animal’s natural behaviours. This is not merely a context of blatant illegality. It also involves the insidious manipulation of minors who may come into contact with this deviant conduct, to the point of representing a genuine risk to the development of juvenile delinquency—a risk that Italian criminal law recognises as an aggravating circumstance.
The amendment is the result of years of field work carried out through the “Io non combatto” (“I Don’t Fight”) project, led by Humane World for Animals Italia and Fondazione Cave Canem. The project has developed behavioural rehabilitation programmes for rescued dogs, initiatives to raise awareness of the need to report crimes against animals, specialised training for law enforcement officers, educational materials for minors and legal and criminological research aimed at encouraging legislative reform. This work has highlighted how Italy’s justice system has often been hampered by a practical obstacle: prosecutors and courts have been unable to cover the costs of housing and caring for seized animals, thereby slowing down confiscation and seizure procedures. That barrier is now beginning to fall.
In July, another important milestone was reached. The Ministry of Labour published the implementing decree regulating access to these funds. A call for applications to distribute the funds among third-sector organisations is expected by the end of the year. At last, the state is taking concrete steps, after leaving this burden for far too long—largely and silently—on the shoulders of volunteers and animal protection groups.
That said, not everything has been achieved. The original version of the amendment also provided funding for specialised training for law enforcement officers. That provision did not make it into the final text. Its exclusion demonstrates how, even when social justice—extended here beyond the boundaries of the human species—manages to find its way into Parliament, it still has to contend with political priorities that tend to treat animal welfare as a residual concern rather than as a measure of how civilised a society is, and a matter worthy of sustained investment.
Yet this precedent matters. Together with the legislative intervention introduced in 2025 by Senate Bill AS 1308—which allows NGOs to obtain permanent custody of seized or confiscated animals before criminal proceedings have concluded—it shows that the law is beginning, albeit tentatively, to recognise animals not merely as seized property awaiting a final disposition, but as beings entitled to a life free from violence by virtue of their sentience.
This is a partial but very real victory. And like every partial victory, it must be defended and built upon. The €2 million allocated for the two-year period cannot, on its own, make up for years of insufficient institutional attention to a criminal enterprise that continues to claim silent victims. The way forward is to renew the fund, at least until animal fighting has been definitively eradicated; to increase it if the number of eligible applications exceeds the available resources; and to secure funding for the specialised training of those investigating these crimes on the ground.
Because our society cannot be satisfied with treating the wounds downstream while failing to invest in stopping the violence upstream.
Caring for those who cannot advocate for themselves is not a sentimental luxury. It is a measure of how willing a community is to allocate resources towards those who need them most—whether human or non-human. These brief but consequential provisions of Italy’s 2026 Budget Law are a measure of that, too.
