Dominic O’Connor has been jailed for two years after he used a lead to kill his dog and fed it to his other pet
A ‘psychopath’ former mental health nurse who strangled and butchered a dog before feeding it to his other pet has been jailed for two years today.
Dominic O’Connor, used a lead to kill the animal in County Down, Northern Ireland, last December, before chopping it up with an axe.
He cooked its body with onions and an OXO stock cube and used it as pet food for his other dog, Shadow.
Today he was jailed for two years and banned from keeping animals for life over his ‘disgraceful’ and ‘heinous’ behaviour.
As he was taken away, an onlooker in the public gallery, Christina Jenkins, shouted: ‘Burn in hell, demon. You are the epitome of evil.’
Passing sentence at Downpatrick Crown Court, judge Piers Grant told O’Connor: ‘The killing of this innocent, vulnerable dog has clearly been your calculation for some time.’
He added: ‘It is clear that you determined to kill this dog and in doing so inflict on this creature serious cruelty.
‘In any view this behaviour is barbaric.’
O’Connor bought the dog on the Gumtree website from someone who expected that the animal would be well-nurtured and looked after, the judge said.
Instead, he choked it to death with a lead at his home in Roden Street in the village of Kircubbin, Co Down, at the second attempt after switching leads.
He shaved, butchered and cooked its body and used it as pet food for his other dog, Shadow, Judge Grant said.
The maximum sentence was five years, or two-and-a-half behind bars.
The judge added: ‘It is appropriate to recognise that the level of cruelty inflicted on this poor animal is very much at the upper end of the spectrum for this type of offending.’
The father-of-two has no memory of the incident at his home on this road in the County Down village of Kircubbin
The father-of-two has no memory of the incident at his home in the village of Kircubbin, his lawyer told Downpatrick Crown Court. O’Connor was convicted by a jury last month.
When questioned by police, O’Connor told officers he shaved and butchered the dog’s body and fed some of it to his other pet.
The judge said it was “inevitable” that the jury would convict him of one count of causing unnecessary suffering to an animal.
No evidence was produced on O’Connor’s own behalf.
In obtaining the animal, Judge Grant said, O’Connor “misled” its previous owners that it would be protected and nurtured.
“People who kept a dog do not hand it over without a care in the world.”
He said they believed it would be looked after.
It would be easy to consider O’Connor’s behaviour bizarre and indicative of mental illness offering some excuse, the judge said, but his legal team had not produced any reliable medical evidence about his mental health.
He has 23 unrelated previous convictions, some of which demonstrated preparedness to act irresponsibly, the judge added.