They bounce birds out of their nest or beat up dogs and cats—children are often depicted as profoundly violent in Spanish educational contexts around 1900. The contribution aims to investigate why animal cruelty in children is of such discursive prominence. It reconstructs historical traditions of violent (ab)use of children in ancient and early modern moral philosophy and places them in the context of pedagogical texts of the time. By approaching moralizing texts with a target audience of minors, pedagogical treatises read by teachers and literary texts dealing with education the article pursues the objective of identifying children’s animal cruelty as a momentum in which the violence of child education in general comes to the fore. Children’s violence towards animals is profiled as a narrative that helps negotiating ideas of social coexistence and the ideal form of state and thus functions as an indicator of the fluctuation between monarchy and democracy that takes place in Spain around 1900.