THE FORMER DEPUTY leader of the Tory party has told the BBC that it was a “terrible misrepresentation” to say that he had strangled his mother’s dog.
Lord Michael Heseltine had been quoted as saying his mother’s dog ‘Kim’ had bitten him so the Tory peer decided it to choke it to death with its own collar.
Speaking to Tatler magazine, he said: “‘I went to stroke him and he started biting me.
“If you have a dog that turns, you just cannot risk it.
So I took Kim’s collar, a sort of choker chain, and pulled it tight.
“Suddenly he went limp. I was devoted to Kim, but he’d obviously had some sort of mental breakdown.”
The ex-deputy prime minister clarified to BBC Radio 4′s PM programme that he had been looking after Kim on a day 1964 and, while he said he did pull the chain tight, the dog relented after a short period and he “went quite limp and reverted to being the dog we all knew and loved.”
The incident created a “most awful dilemma” about what to do next, according to Hesseltine. Kim was taken to be put down the next day.
He added that the “misreprentation” arose when he was asked about a similar story in which he was said to have killed a dog with his bare hands after it attacked a child. Instead of recalling that story, Hesseltine told the story concerning Kim instead.
The RSPCA in the UK has been notified of the incident but has indicated that it can only investigate and prosecute such offences within three years of the alleged action taking place.
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