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Ontario’s top court has cleared a Windsor man of the criminal charge of wilfully killing a dog, more than five years after he taped its muzzle shut with electrical tape and left it tied it to a tree with a choke chain, causing the male German Shepherd to panic and die by strangulation.

John MacKenzie, who was 56 when he was tried in March, 2014, was looking after the dog for a friend who was serving a jail sentence. MacKenzie himself also had a female Weimaraner in the home he shared with his mother in Belle River, Ont., on Lake St. Clair near Windsor.

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The boarding of the unnamed German Shepherd was not going well. It had bitten MacKenzie on the hand one day, and so the next morning, when he needed to bring it inside because it would not stop barking, MacKenzie told investigators he taped the dog’s muzzle shut. But even that was not enough, so he chained it to the tree and left it alone.

Two hours later, it was dead. When a support worker for MacKenzie’s mother arrived, she found the dog on the ground, strangled by the choke chain, so tight “it was disgusting,” the worker testified.