A 68-year-old man has been jailed for looking after another person's dog.

Blackburn magistrates heard that John Robert Muir Layland was banned for life from keeping horses or dogs after being convicted of cruelty and neglect charges involving racehorses and dogs in 1997.

And he was deemed to be in breach of the ban when a greyhound belonging to his girlfriend ran out of his farmyard and killed a neighbour's cat.

The magistrates imposed an immediate prison sentence despite hearing from defence solicitor Graham Tindall that the breach was a technical one and that prior to the incident in May Layland had spoken and written to the police to check that it was all right for his girlfriend to have her 30 dogs at his house.

"He is guilty because on the day of this incident he was the only person home and he was technically in charge of this dog," said Mr Tindall.

"He has to accept that he is guilty of a technical offence but this is not a flagrant breach of the order."

But the magistrates imposed an immediate 30 day sentence on Layland, of Demesne Farm, Settle Road, Newsholme, near Clitheroe, after he pleaded guilty to having custody of a dog in breach of a disqualification order under the Protection of Animals Act.

Mr Tindall immediately lodged an appeal against sentence.

Sentencing Layland the chairman of the magistrates said it had been a wilful breach of the order for which he had shown a total disregard.

Layland, a former master of the hunt, was jailed for three months in July 1997 after pleading guilty to cruelty and neglect charges after police and animal welfare officers had found 15 National Hunt racehorses and a foal in a barn.

They were covered in excrement and standing in three-feet of manure with no bedding. Another horse was discovered dead in an outbuilding and there were five dead dogs in plastic bags in a summerhouse. Layland was ordered to pay £10,000 compensation to the Horse and Pony Protection Association which took over the care of the surviving animals.

Following the court case Layland was banned from the UK's 59 racecourses for 10 years by the sport's governing body, the Jockey Club.

A spokesman for HAPPA, the Horses and Ponies Protection Association, based in Burnley, today welcomed the sentence. He said: "The Gisburn 16 was probably one of the worst cases we have seen.

"For that sort of thing the punishment he has received may seem harsh if it was a one off, but he has done it before and hasn't learned from the past and needs to go to jail."

He added: "It was a big job to rehabilitate them. What had happened to them was absolutely horrific.

"It has cost the charity a lot of money. One horse, Fraser, was the worst affected and has never really recovered from the ordeal. When he came to use he just wanted to lay down to die.

"It will stay with him for the rest of his life. We haven't let him out to anyone else because we need to keep a constant eye on him."