A pet owner did her dog “a favour” when she threw it from the top floor of a multi-storey car park, she has said.
CCTV footage captured the moment Amy Judge, 26, threw a defenceless Maltese Shih Tzu from the top storey of the Westfield Whitford City shopping centre in Perth, Western Australia, in April 2022.
The dog, named Princess, was found to have fallen nine metres, resulting in severe injuries, including brain injury, possible internal haemorrhaging and spinal and pelvic trauma.
Princess was later put down, and Judge, from Clarkson in Perth, was sentenced to a year in jail this week for throwing the animal, a crime to which she admitted in a post to Facebook.
She posted a confession explaining she “did her a favour” and that she needed to tell the truth so she could stop living “with all the lies”.
Writing on the social media platform, Judge said she couldn’t “live with the guilt” of what she had done to Princess.
She said she “threw my dog off the top story (sic) of a shopping centre car park and watched her fall to her death”.
The post, which received 122 comments, added that she “survived and needed to be put down due to how badly I injured her”.
Judge said she needed the truth “out in the open”, as the act was “tearing me apart”, and she couldn’t “live with the lies anymore”.
She added that she “did her a favour because all I did was hurt her and abuse her”.
The post concluded: “Now everybody knows the truth and I can put my mind at ease knowing I no longer have to live with all the lies.”
CCTV footage played in court showed Judge appearing to argue with her partner Scott Frost, 23, atop the parking complex while repeatedly dangling Princess over the edge.
The footage also shows she allowed the dog to walk on the roof edge for approximately eight minutes before she threw the animal.
Sentencing Magistrate Mark Millington said Judge had left Princess for dead and described the act as “planned, deliberate, and intentional”.
Judge was jailed for ten months for throwing her dog, and an additional two for unrelated incidents, and banned from owning animals for 10 years, while Frost was fined AUD2,500 and banned from owning animals for three years for failing to seek veterinary care for the dog.
