How could the criminals be so cruel?

FIVE-YEAR-OLD cocker spaniel Bella was stolen from a farm in Braintree, Essex, in October 2015. she was reunited with her owner, HR co-ordinator Francesca Debnam-sharp, 25, after being found, along with four other dogs, dumped by the side of the road in Kent.

Bella was a working dog on my family’s farm but she was also a pet and was very loved. as a working dog, she slept in a locked kennel. She was stolen at some point during the night.

My parents and I took to social media and phoned the police. We put up posters. We did everything we could.

We absolutely adored her. She hadn’t been spayed though we had never bred her and had no plans to, but I knew that was why she was taken.

Whenever I saw a spaniel in the street, I would slow down to check if it was her, but as the years passed, we all started to lose hope. That’s why it was such a bolt from the blue when we got the call in October last year from a dog warden saying she’d been picked up and identified from her microchip.

I was living in Birmingham at the time and drove

straight to my parents’ farm after they went to pick her up from council kennels. I just couldn’t believe it when I saw her. She was so happy to be home, but the state of her broke my heart. How can anyone do this to a defenceless creature?

When I saw her, she was in a bad way. She had a severe case of mange, her skin was covered in sores, and her fur was matted and stained yellow from where she had been sat in urine.

She hadn’t been exercised at all. She was just bred and bred until she was of no use to the heartless criminals who stole her.

We are like best friends now and she’s recovered well. She is still full of energy and like my shadow.

It makes me furious that the law treats dog theft the same as theft of property.

This needs to change, especially as people are only sentenced in accordance with the monetary value of the dog. The value of a dog can’t be defined by money — they are part of your family.