Man jailed after brutal slaying of little horse
The man who stabbed a miniature horse 41 times has been jailed for two and a half years.
Reginald Robert Ozanne pleaded guilty to a charge of wilfully illtreating an animal when he appeared before the Dunedin District Court in March.
On February 17 last year, Ozanne entered a paddock by Pitt St in Waitati where Star was tethered for the night, sometime after 9.30pm.
He was armed with a “sharp object” and inflicted 41 stab wounds, particularly focused on the back, neck and throat.
Star was found the next morning by a dog walker who alerted authorities, and was taken to Invermay for emergency treatment but died a couple of days later.
Months before being charged, however, Ozanne forcefully denied being responsible when his Waitati home was raided by police.
Judge Michael Crosbie said Ozanne’s conduct following the killing “could be viewed as reprehensible”.
“You front-footed your innocence through the media and you deflected the blame in the direction of others which, in a small community, lands somewhere,” he said.
Star’s owner Mandy Mayhem-Bullock said the four and a half months of waiting for the arrest was the hardest part.
In a statement read in court, she said the defendant had come to her home uninvited shortly after the vicious slaying to stress his innocence.
Ozanne even called a public meeting in the local library in a bid to clear his name, she said. “I replayed that gruesome scene in my head . . . a dark figure out there so close to our houses. A crazy evil act that only our big horses were witness to.”
Defence counsel Deborah Henderson said her client had consumed half a bottle of home-brewed whiskey on the night in question, along with prescription painkillers.
The remainder of the night was a blank, she said.