LOST HIS TEMPER

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 870, 14 January 1930, Page 16

LOST HIS TEMPER

MAN WHO KILLED STRANGE DOG WELL-TRAINED WITNESS ”1 saw him take hold of the dog by the hind leg, swing it in the air, and dash its head on the concrete pg»th,” said a witness in the Onehunga Police Court yesterday, when Thomas F. Young was charged with cruelty to animals. Constable R. Wilks told the court that Young called at the police station afterward and reported having killed a dog that had been worrying his pigeons. He . said lie . had kicked the animal in the stomach and made it sick, so he tried to kill it. The constable saw the dog later, when it was still alive, but unconscious. IJe had it destroyed with the consent of its owner. Young, in defence, said he saw the dog with a pigeon in its mouth, and when he tried to catch it, it bit him on the wrist. He thought he had killed it outright. His motive for reporting it to , the police was not because he heard that someone else wo U?--- He did not show Constable Wilks where he had been bitten, and could. not account for the failure of the police to find any traces of the pigeon or its feathers. One of the witnesses, a little girl, told of seeing Young ill-treating the dog. Under cross-examination by Mr. Singer, she admitted that she had been instructed what to say. “I have been saying it over to myself in bed at night,” she said. Mr. Singer: And did you say it over again this morning? Witness: Yes, before I got up. “Produce the bite,” ordered Mr. Woodward, S.M„ and Young displayed his wrist, but the wound was apparently not deep enough to get him off. ‘You lost your temper and tried to kill the dog,” said the magistrate, as he fined accused £5, with costs amounting to another £3. Young was also called upon to contribute £1 and costs on another charge of having swerved to the right and passed a stationary tramcar in Queen Street, Onehunga.