Focus: Suffering peacocks! Or how Misty the dog paid the ultimate price

Every dog has his day, but 26 February was not Misty's. John Morrish visits the crime scene of a very English murder

Good fences make good neighbours, or so they say. But pets have quite the opposite effect. They've been learning that lesson in Gloucestershire, where a bitter court case about animals is threatening the peace in a previously harmonious working community. Here among the Cotswold hills in February a peacock was found mortally wounded. Minutes later, a dog was dead too, this time from a bullet wound to the head. And after nine months, a two-day trial and a conviction for criminal damage, those are the only facts anyone can be sure of.

Ullenwood Court, outside Cheltenham, has no fences: if it had, Michael Cuttell, owner of the peacock, and David Baker, owner of the dog, might be better neighbours. Ullenwood Court is no ancestral home: it's an old military camp (technically known as a "hutment" which means, literally, a load of huts) bought by the Cuttell family in the early 1960s and partially cleared by them for farming.

A mixture of ancient sheds and pristine gardens, it now includes an industrial estate, a riding stable, a caravan site, several holiday homes, the Cuttell house and a helipad and hangar for an Alouette helicopter. Mr Cuttell – the stress is on the second syllable – cleared the site with his father, then took on the business. He was also a justice of the peace until two years ago, and was chairman of the parish council, leading a campaign for a tunnel to remove a blackspot on the nearby A417. As a hobby, he keeps rare white peacocks, feeding them and locking up every night.

David Baker is Mr Cuttell's major tenant. His firm, Meta-Morphose, trains graduates for sales careers. It employs 30 in a couple of the estate's more presentable buildings, one of which has a panelled boardroom. Until earlier this year, Meta-Morphose also had a company dog, a five-year-old Wheaton terrier. Every dog has its day, but 26 February was not Misty's.

What happened then had the hallmarks of a classic dispute between neighbours: laxness about boundaries (real or metaphorical), a dramatic incident, a police investigation, the hardening of positions, the polishing of memories, a traumatic court case and a resolution that satisfied no one.

It began with a peacock, seriously injured on the estate road, then finished off by the estate workers. Then Misty turned up – not an unfamiliar sight on the estate – but this time with blood on her paws and muzzle. Mr Cuttell told his men to lock her in a shed and to get on with dealing with another peacock that had flown up into a tree.

Meanwhile, he fetched his .22 rifle. He told police that he opened the shed, intending to take Misty back to its owner, but that as he did so, she darted towards a passing peahen. He fired a warning shot, but hit the dog in the side and seriously injured her. So he dragged her into the shed and decided to put her out of her misery. But he had already used his one bullet: so now he went several hundred yards back to his house, reloaded, drove his Range Rover back to the shed and shot her in the head.

But when the case came before Swindon magistrates, Misty's vet said he had found only one injury: the bullet in the skull. What is more, witnesses said they had only heard one shot. The landlord was fined £500 for criminal damage and failing to comply with his firearms certificate, plus £1,000 costs. Mr Baker did not emerge unscathed, however. The court refused him compensation, saying he was "an irresponsible owner".

At Ullenwood last week there was both a hardening of attitudes and a deep bafflement. Mr Cuttell is apparently in France, hoping to put it behind him. The staff would not speak, but others were happy to come to his defence.

"He does come across a little strong sometimes," said Melanie Pitt, who runs a riding stable on the estate. "Sometimes I have to hold the phone away from my ear when I'm speaking to him, but he's very fair." There had been incidents between peacocks and dogs belonging to her clients, but they had discussed and worked round them.

Tenants are obliged to keep dogs on leads, but in Misty's case that was not enforced, which muddied the waters. Mr Baker says Misty was not interested in the birds, but others say there were earlier incidents. "He must have known that was upsetting Mike, and Mike would have said so in no uncertain terms," said Ms Pitt, who has known him for 15 years. "But what happened that day, I wouldn't know. I think he was so upset about the bird he wasn't thinking straight. Mike wouldn't really shoot a dog. If he did it, he didn't do it out of spite. He's not that kind of man."

Mr Cuttell told the court: "I'm very fond of animals. I am very fond of children. I'm one of those soft types of people." He does not hunt, fish or shoot, and the estate bears the plaque of the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group.

Mr Baker comes from a different world. There are BMWs in his car park; he wears the dark suit of a salesman and it is easy to see him as the arrogant incomer doing down the local squire – "slagging off a decent man" as one local put it. And yet this big, bluff man seemed both hurt and baffled last week. "I'm at a bit of a low ebb," he admitted. "I feel as though I won the war, but everybody died."

His aim is to get off the property: he will probably move just his own office for now, because Meta-Morphose's lease has some years to run. "It's an event I tend to relive, and coming here means I relive it every day. For eight months we have managed to avoid each other. The newspapers have been full of so many half-truths. Nobody wins."

Mr Baker has not spoken to his landlord since the fateful day, nor opened letters from him which apparently contain an apology. "I know he feels dreadful, but he shouldn't have done it. I feel dreadful too."

Of course, disputes break out between neighbours all over the world. People fight about boundaries, about noise and car-parking, and about nothing at all. In England, where we sometimes love our pets more than people, it only takes a wandering dog to ruffle feathers.

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