CRUELTY CASE MUM GIVEN ANIMAL BAN
A MUM has been banned from keeping animals for three years after being found guilty of cruelty to three chinchillas and a cockatiel.Karen Bone, 29, of Normanton Road, Oakridge, Basingstoke, denied four charges of abandoning the animals in circumstances likely to cause them unnecessary suffering but was convicted after a trial.
Her former partner Edward Hurcombe, 62, of Galahad Close, Andover, admitted all four charges.
They were both given a conditional discharge for two years and were banned from keeping any animal for three years.
Sentencing the pair, magistrates' chairman Mrs Sylvia Peach said: "This was a case in which the animals had been subjected to serious neglect which would have caused them unreasonable suffering.
"You had abandoned them to their fate and the bench takes a serious view of your behaviour." Mr Mark Ashley, prosecuting, told Basingstoke magistrates that four days after the couple had been evicted from a house in Lune Court, Andover, landlord Gary Lawton found a chinchilla trapped behind a TV and a cockatiel in a darkened store room.
He called in the RSPCA who found two more chinchillas running around loose in the ceiling space and the carcasses of two other dead chinchillas in the house.
Mr Ashley said the landlord had evicted the couple from the house because of complaints about the smell and noise from there.
The court heard that during his clean-up at the property, Mr Lawton filled nine dustbin bags with animal faeces.
Mr Ashley told the court there was no question that the animals, being left without food and water for four days, would have suffered and Hurcombe had admitted this.
What the court had to decide was whether or not the animals were under the care and control of Bone.
Bone, who said she has two sons aged five and 10 by Hurcombe, told the justices that they no longer lived together and the children have been taken into care.
She added that she had left the house in Andover a week before Hurcombe and, as they were his animals, had assumed he had made arrangements for them.
She took her two cats with her when she left and, because she could not keep them where she is now living, arranged for them to go to good homes through a cat rescue organisation.
"I love animals but I don't have any now," she told the magistrates.
"I didn't want any harm coming to the chinchillas.
I thought Mr Hurcombe would remove the animals himself." Hurcombe told the court that the chinchillas and cockatiel were his and said that although Bone had sometimes fed them, they were his responsibility.
"I know I did wrong but I panicked when I got the eviction notice," he told the magistrates.
"I didn't have time to contact the RSPCA.
I am ashamed of what happened." However, finding Bone guilty, Mrs Peach said: "We are satisfied that you had been involved in the care and control of these animals in a shared capacity on a regular basis over a period of years.
"Once the animals had been left alone in the property, you took no steps to inform the landlord or the relevant authorities that they were in there and that there was no-one to care for them." Mr Nigel Bourne asked the magistrates to suspend the ban on owning animals in Hurcombe's case as he has two dogs and was appealing against that part of the sentence.
The justices agreed to do this.
Speaking afterwards, Mr Bourne said he was considering an appeal against Bone's conviction.
The three chinchillas and cockatiel are now being looked after at an animal sanctuary.
