Two women have been jailed for torturing and killing a friend's exotic parrot after a booze-fueling night out.
Nicola Bradley, 35 and Tracey Dixon, 47 doused ex-soldier Paul Crooks’s African grey parrot in cleaning products and threw it into the tumble dryer.
The despicable pair also splattered the bird with paint and shaving cream, before snapping Sparky the parrot’s neck in a “sadistic” attack.
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Yesterday (Tuesday, August 29), the pair were jailed for 25 months at Carlisle Crown Court.
The Daily Star previously reported that the pair had been found guilty of causing unnecessary suffering to the protected animal.
Owner Crooks cried after the loss of his beloved bird, saying how Sparky would entertain him by singing the Coronation Street theme tune.
Prosecutor Daniel Bramhall told today's sentencing hearing the cruel pair daubed the bird with gloss paint and covered her with shaving foam and Mr. Muscle polish.
They then threw her into a switched-on tumble drier before one of them – said in court to have been Bradley – snapped its neck.
As they left the house where they did this, they told Sparky's unsuspecting owner they'd been "wetting themselves" with laughter," though they did not say why.
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Judge Richard Archer told the two women: “You together sadistically tortured and essentially killed Sparky. The way in which suffering was caused to that animal is shocking.
“It involved spraying her with cleaning products; it involved daubing paint on her; and it involved hitting her with a tea towel.
“It involved placing her in a tumble dryer and turning it on and it involved, once the door to the tumbler dryer was opened and Sparky was gasping for her last breath, one of you ringing her neck.”
The women made no effort to explain to Mr Crooks why they had done what they did and they sought to blame each other, the court heard.
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The judge added: “It is frankly beyond comprehension how anyone could treat an animal in this way, let alone in your case, Miss Dixon, someone who it is said took in animals, rescued animals, subjected to suffering at the hands of others.”
Bradley and Dixon both blamed each other for the bird's death.
During the trial before Magistrates, Mr Crooks described his horror at finding Sparky dead shortly after Bradley and Dixon left his home on July 30 last year.
He'd allowed the women, who had enjoyed a boozy night out together in Carlisle, Cumbria, to stay at his home after giving them a lift from the city centre.
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Describing his pet, Mr Crooks said Sparky was a gift from a former partner and had lived with him for five years.
Judge Archer said he had seen the photo of Sparky after she was killed, in which she was “unrecognisable.”
He added: "This is a case where appropriate punishment can only be achieved by immediate custody. If an immediate prison sentence were not warranted or required for the deliberate, sadistic torture to death of an animal, then one can not imagine a case where it would be appropriate to impose an immediate custodial sentence."
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