DOGS REPRIEVED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23707, 14 January 1939, Page 21

DOGS REPRIEVED

PEDIGREE ANIMALS “ NOT SHEEP-KILLERS ” WOMAN OWNER’S EXPERIMENT To prove that her 11 pedigree setter dogs, reprieved from death, are not sheep-killers by instinct, a Sussex woman is to make them mix with sheep every day. “ I intend to buy a flock,” she told a London newspaper representative, “ and place them in a field adjoining the kennels. That will prove that my dogs did only what other puppies might do.” On October 11 the woman, Miss Kathleen Slattery, of Framfield, was ordered by the Uckfield magistrates to destroy her pets because one or more of them had worried sheep. GOING AWAY

Later, before the East Sussex Appeals Committee, she appealed successfully against the magistrate’s order. The committee, however, directed that the dogs should be kept under proper control. i Miss Slattery will not stay to see the results of her sheep-near-ken-nels experiment. She stated _ that she intended to leave the district as soon as possible because of the hostility of local farmers toward her. “Although it is the first time the dogs have done anything of this kind,” she said, “ it has aroused the suspicion of the farmers, who believe reports that my pets are dangerous.” HERODIAN In his plea to the committee, Mr Eric Neve, Miss Slattery’s counsel, spoke of the “ Herodian nature of the order, by which a lot of innocents were ordered to be destroyed.” “To punish all 11 for what one may have done,” he said, “ is unconscionably harsh slaughter. Tins sentence is revolting.” Miss Slattery was prepared, he continued, to give an undertaking that the dogs would be kept under rigid control, and that she would dispose of them in the best possible way. After the hearing. Miss Slattery went into a local inn and stood drinks to the villagers.