A man who pleaded guilty to causing unnecessary suffering to seven dogs in his care has been ordered to pay more than €15,000 in fines and costs and disqualified from keeping dogs for 10 years.
Mallow District Court heard the dogs found at Pat O’Neill’s property in Co Cork had matted coats after being forced to lie in their own faeces in a shed.
O’Neill, who is in his 50s, of Lanefield House, Gooseberry Hill, Newmarket, on Monday pleaded guilty to 15 breaches of the Animal Health and Welfare Act 2013 when he was prosecuted by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.
He admitted causing unnecessary suffering to seven dogs, failing to protect their health and welfare, and failing to provide them with uncontaminated drinking water and wholesome food at Gooseberry Hill on May 15th, 2024.
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Caroline Faherty, a welfare inspector with the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA), said she was alerted to the situation by Cork County Council dog warden John Manning.
When she called to O’Neill’s property, she said she found an adult collie, a juvenile collie, four collie pups and an adult terrier being kept in a shed.
The shed floor was covered in faeces and all the dogs had matted coats and were encrusted with faeces. There was only one bowl of water in the shed and one of the collie pups was so thirsty that it was drinking effluent.
None of the dogs were emaciated but all were underweight. The two adult dogs, the collie and the terrier, were friendly, but the pups were feral, showing fear and aggression and indicating that they were never properly socialised.
Faherty issued a seizure order to O’Neill and removed the dogs. The court heard the adult collie had to be shaved to remove her matted hair and it took several months to rehabilitate the four pups through socialisation, with the costs amounting to €10,766.
Judge Colm Roberts said it was frightening how many people did not know that dogs need socialisation, noting that “if it was a child, it would be called early childhood trauma”.
Faherty agreed, saying that intelligent dogs such as collies need stimulation.
Defence barrister David Kent said O’Neill inherited the dogs from his late father, who died a year earlier. While he thought he was providing enough food and water for them and cleaning the shed sufficiently regularly, his efforts were clearly not good enough, Kent added.
He said his client’s offending was more an act of omission rather than commission and there was no deliberate intention to harm the dogs. He said his client was not breeding pups commercially and the adult collie got pregnant when she got out of the shed one evening.
The judge asked at what point continuous omission became commission. He said allowing dogs to live in a filthy shed as O’Neill had done might be considered by some to constitute harm to the animal. He questioned if the dogs should have been in O’Neill’s care at all.
Kent pleaded for leniency and suggested that his client might benefit from the Probation Act to avoid a criminal conviction.
However, the judge said he was anxious to impose a disqualification, as prosecution barrister Meg Burke had suggested was available to him, and he could only do that in the event of a conviction.
He convicted O’Neill on all 15 counts and disqualified him from keeping dogs for 10 years. He ordered him to pay €500 fines on six of the offences as well as pay €10,766 in costs for rehabilitating the pups, €2,500 in legal costs, and €1,600 in veterinary witness costs. This left O’Neill with a total bill of €15,809.
