BBC NEWS | England | Sussex | Man jailed for stabbing pet dog
A man has been jailed for six months for stabbing his own dog 55 times and abandoning it in a park in Brighton.
Patrick Walker, 36, from Brighton, was also banned from having an animal for life by magistrates on Thursday.
The chairman told him the offence was so serious that only a custodial sentence would fit the crime.
Walker was found guilty of causing unnecessary suffering to an animal at Brighton Magistrates' Court at an earlier hearing.
He had told magistrates he killed the dog after it attacked his partner's 17-year-old daughter.
But RSPCA inspector Tony Pritchard said the dog was under control at the time and Mr Walker's stepdaughter had left the scene.
Sentencing Walker, the chair of the magistrates said: "You carried out a sustained and vicious attack on a dog with a hunting knife which caused multiple stab wounds and led to its death.
"Had you pleaded guilty you would have been given 16 weeks."
He was prosecuted by the RSPCA after the American bulldog was found dead in undergrowth in Moulsecoomb Wild Park in October 2007.