A company director accused of killing his neighbour's dog by hitting it with a garden hoe following a long-running dispute had the case against him dismissed today.

Magistrates said Neville Hill, 48, was defending his property when he struck a fatal blow to five-year-old border terrier Wurzel.

The dog's owner, Tricia Wales, funded a private prosecution alleging criminal damage against Mr Hill after the RSPCA said it would not prosecute due to the fact that the animal was rendered immediately unconscious and did not feel any pain.

The blow fractured the bitch's skull, causing it to haemorrhage, and the animal had to be put down due to the extent of its injuries following the incident on September 21 last year.

Mr Hill said he did not mean to harm the dog, but was only trying to stop it from attacking his own elderly Dalmatian, Jasper.

He told magistrates he picked up one of the nearest implements he could find - a garden hoe - and used it to try to shoo Wurzel and Miss Wales's other two dogs away after he returned home to find them terrorising his chickens in his garden.

He said he purposely held it the wrong way round so that he was pointing the handle at the animals as he did not want to do them any harm.

He told the court: "I was sweeping it across, there was never any intention to actually connect with any of the dogs.

"It was a very unfortunate incident, a millisecond either way and it would have missed the dog completely."

During the one-and-a-half day trial, Chichester Magistrates' Court heard that Mr Hill and Miss Wales lived next door to one another in a row of terraced cottages in the village of Yapton, near Arundel, West Sussex.

They got on well with one another when Mr Hill moved in around four years before the incident happened, but things "deteriorated a short time afterwards" as they fell out over his claims that her three terriers kept getting into his garden, fouling on his lawn and scaring his chickens.

The court heard it was the responsibility of Miss Wales, who lived in the cottage with her 15-year-old son, George, Wurzel and two other border terriers, Kylie and Charlie, to maintain the hedge that separated their gardens.

He said: "She denied all knowledge, refusing to accept any responsibility for her dogs' actions at all. From the moment I complained about her dogs' mess we never really spoke."

Mr Hill, whose partner moved into the end-of-terrace cottage in 2005, also complained about the three terriers' loud barking. "It made it uncomfortable for us to be in the garden," he said. "The noise was horrendous."

He told magistrates the situation became so bad that he put his house on the market and moved to Copse Lane, Walberton.

Magistrates decided that as there were no witnesses to the incident they could not prove that Mr Hill meant to harm Wurzel or was acting recklessly and it was his right to defend his own dog and chickens as the incident took place on his own land.

Veterinary pathologist, David Martin, who conducted a post mortem examination on Wurzel, also said its injuries were consistent with a single blow to the head.

Speaking afterwards, father-of-three Mr Hill said: "Common sense has prevailed".

Miss Wales said she was "disappointed" at the verdict.