A judge has ordered an XL bully owner to secure her garden in case her pet gets into a neighbouring primary school.
Fiona Brady was due to be sentenced at Craigavon Magistrates Court after her XL bully Skylar bit a woman but District Judge Michael Ranaghan said he had concerns about how secure her garden is.
Brady, from Bayview Park in the town, lives beside St Mary’s Primary School and while she has since installed mesh at one part of her garden a lawyer for the council conceded she did not know how secure it actually is.
“It’s an improvement but I would not be confident it would keep out a large aggressive dog,” she told the court.
Deferring the case to 4 February, the judge ordered that the council had to go and inspect Brady’s garden and that the defendant had to make her garden as secure as possible.
“That is a school,” Judge Ranaghan declared, “if an XL bully went running amock in a school amongst the children that’s more serious than anything the court is considering today.”
Brady had earlier entered guilty pleas to keeping an XL bully which attacked a woman on 31 July last year and a further charge that she failed to muzzle her XL bully in public on the same date.
In a prosecution brought by the council, the court heard how the victim was walking her dog close to Brady’s home when she “noticed a dog off the lead up the street.”
“She stopped with her dog so that it would not react but the dog came down the street and attacked her dog,” said the lawyer, adding that when the victim stood in front of her pet to protect it, the XL bully bit her on the leg.
Whilst the bite caused bruising the skin was not broken and the victim did not need medical treatment and Brady who was at the scene, took Skylar back inside, the court heard.
She emphasised that under new legislation the XL bully is a banned breed but that in this case, the council were not seeking a destruction order as Brady has applied for and will be issued an exemption certificate for Skylar and there are no previous incidents involving the dog.
Defence counsel David McKeown told the judge that Brady “is very sorry for what happened to this lady” and that since the incident, she had installed mesh to try to make her property more secure.
Both Mr McKeown and the council’s lawyer conceded they did not know whether that would keep Skylar inside and secure, hence why Judge Ranaghan put the case back for a month.