A father encouraged his 11-year-old son to use an air rifle to kill a wood pigeon in the back garden of their Wolverhampton home.

Robert Jones avoided an immediate jail sentence when he appeared before city magistrates. The case was brought by the RSPCA after a neighbour of the 50-year-old, who lives in Regis Road, Tettenhall, reported the shooting. District Judge Martin Brown told him: “This may appear to be a storm in a tea cup to you but it raises serious moral failings in bringing up your child.”

Jones, an unemployed project manager, pleaded guilty to aiding, abetting or counselling his son to kill a wild bird in June last year.

Roger Price, prosecuting, said an RSPCA inspector who called at the house found a pigeon lying under the hedge halfway down the garden. Although still alive when he picked it up, the bird died in his arms.

A veterinary post mortem showed two wounds to the chest and neck. The first pellet, shot from a distance, had probably disabled the bird and prevented it from flying off while the second, from close range, had been fatal, the magistrates court heard yesterday.

Mr Price said: “The bird was in pain and had been left to suffer as it died.

“When the defendant’s neighbour chastised his son for being cruel, Mr Jones told him ‘Everyone’s entitled to their opinion but when a pigeon lands in my back garden, I kill it’.”

Jones told RSPCA investigators that he did not believe it was an offence to shoot pigeons on his own property. His son had asked his permission to use the pellet gun and he had supervised him as he used it.

He told the court he and his son used the gun for target practice, shooting at tin cans in the garden, and he saw no problem in killing pigeons which he regarded as “flying vermin”.

Sentencing him to 12 weeks imprisonment, suspended for 12 months, the judge told Jones: “You put in the hands of your 11-year-old son a dangerous weapon which you then allowed him to use against an animal.

“You have created in the mind of your child that it’s OK to kill a wild animal.”

Jones was also ordered to carry out 180 hours of unpaid work and pay £2,700 in costs and compensation. He said afterwards: “The whole thing has been blown out of all proportion.”