Dog chained and starved to death

A 37-year-old Kaikohe woman who chained up a dog and let it starve to death has been convicted in the Kaikohe District Court on charges of failing to ensure the physical, health and behavioural needs of an animal were met by failing to provide sufficient food and water, failing to allow the animal to display normal patterns of behaviour, and failing to ensure an animal received treatment to alleviate unreasonable or unnecessary pain or distress.

Nadia Hayley Tauteka was sentenced to 150 hours' community work, ordered to pay court costs of $150 and reparation of $592.59, and disqualified from owning dogs for five years.

The court heard that two Bay of Islands SPCA inspectors visited a Kaikohe property in April last year, acting on information received from a Housing New Zealand property manager, who said the tenants who had been living there had moved, leaving behind two dogs, one of which was dead.

The inspectors found the dead dog lying on a pile of rubbish on the back lawn, covered with a foam mattress. There was no sign of a second dog.

The dead animal was extremely thin with its hips, ribs, spine, and shoulder bones all sharp and clearly obvious. Its flanks were sunken and there were sores on its pin bones. Its body was covered with fleas and fly eggs had been laid around its mouth. It was tethered by the neck with a thick chain that was more than three metres long and weighed 3.7kg, almost half the weight of the dog.

Veterinary examination and necropsy revealed the dog had been in extremely bad shape, with an estimated body condition score of 1 out of 9 (1 being emaciated, 9 being obese). On the left side of its neck was a shallow skin wound that would have caused pain, probably caused by the chain.

The dog's small intestine contained dozens of hookworms, and dozens of live fleas were found on its skin. The stomach and intestinal tract did not contain any food.

The veterinarian concluded that the cause of death was chronic parasitism and starvation, and that the parasite burdens and emaciation would have caused chronic suffering and distress to the dog. The veterinarian further commented that tethering the dog in one location for a prolonged period could have increased its exposure to flea pupae and hookworm larvae arising from faeces, which would have worsened its parasite burden.

When interviewed, Tauteka confirmed that she had been in charge of the dog, having picked it up on the side of the road several weeks earlier and taken it home. She had chained it to a fence beside a dog kennel and did not let it off the chain until it died. She had last seen the dog when she moved out.

She acknowledged that the dog had been thin and sickly, but she had not had time to seek treatment for it. She had not thought to worm it.

"We see appalling cases of casual neglect just like this one far too often," Royal New Zealand SPCA CEO Ric Odom said.

"Most of us tend to assume that any normal person would never chain a dog up and starve it to death, but clearly there are people in our community who are capable of doing exactly that. So we need members of the public to step up and report any cases of animal neglect or abuse they see. The sooner we know what's going on, the better chance we have of saving the animal involved."