CONVICTED (2024) | Marcus Crosby, born 13 September 1999, of Laburnum Grove, High Clarence, Middlesbrough TS2 1SU, Thomas Jay Tyers, born 3 January 2004, of 2 Sidlaw Road, Billingham TS23 2ER, Liam Parkinson, born c. 1998, of 6 Victoria Terrace, Port Clarence, Middlesbrough TS2 1SR and Brogan Smithson, born c. 2006, currently no fixed abode, Stockton-on-Tees – goaded a terrier into savaging a squealing badger to death.
The four men pleaded guilty to ill-treatment of a badger and causing unnecessary suffering to a protected animal.
The court heard the badger baiters, who had a pitbull-type dog and a lurcher with them, had travelled to a remote location on the North Yorkshire moors in a Jeep Cherokee in the early hours of May 12, 2023.
On hearing the commotion, members of the public had alerted police.
Officers located the group as they looked under bushes at where the pitbull terrier was savaging the badger. One man was filming the carnage.
The badger was screaming and later died.
The group broke up and headed for their vehicle as the police approached. Police confiscated both dogs.
Christopher Marley, for the four, said the owner of the pitbull terrier was not among the defendants in the dock. Parkinson owned the lurcher.
Marley said his clients had come to North Yorkshire looking for rabbits, but the pitbull terrier had jumped out of the window and found the badger.
The judge said he found the rabbit story “difficult to believe”.
Marley said Parkinson worked in Newcastle and needed his driving licence to commute daily to his job.
He said that Smithson had mental health problems that had led to him being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. His involvement was “perhaps peripheral” as he had been filming the badger incident.
Sentencing the group, district judge Adrian Lower said that some of them had “played greater roles, some of you played lesser roles but you were all in this together.
“You all knew what was going on and you all took part in this.”
The badger’s death would have impacted the lives of other badgers within the locale, particularly if she had cubs, he said.
Sentencing | 12-month community order. Crosby, Tyers and Parkinson were ordered to do 150 hours’ unpaid work. Smithson was fined £200. Each of them must pay a £114 statutory surcharge and £85 prosecution costs. Banned from coming to North Yorkshire for 12 months and given 12-month driving bans. All are banned from keeping or owning dogs for five years (expires October 2029).