Updated 5.40pm

A Santa Venera couple driven to their wit’s end by 20 dogs barking next door have filed a judicial protest in an attempt to finally get some peace and quiet.

Michael and Sylvia Hudson said that their next-door neighbour had taken up “pet sitting” as a business and turned their maisonette into a veritable dog pound.

While the larger animals were kept on the roof, even in summer, the smaller animals were kept indoors.

However, this state of things meant that the neighbours had to keep up with incessant barking, not daring to open their windows since that would mean having to put up with a strong stench of animal excrement, the judicial protest read.

Moreover, the protesting couple told the court that they sometimes found “unfamiliar” dogs wandering in the common areas of the maisonettes which were littered with animal dirt and fur, forcing the couple to seek medical care against the risk of infection.

In their protest, which they filed against the Animal Welfare director, the couple said that the situation was “totally intolerable” and that the director had been “misled” into believing that the unlicensed commercial activity did not need a permit to operate as it was a “pet sitting” service.

The Animal Welfare director had inspected the premises and declared it “clean” but done nothing to halt the activity, even though the confined space the dogs were being restricted to amounted to animal cruelty, the couple said.

They included a number of photos with their judicial protest to back their claim.

For these reasons, the couple, by means of their lawyer Edward Gatt, who signed the protest, called upon the Animal Welfare Director to immediately put a stop to this “illegal and abusive activity” whilst reserving the right to further action.

Neighbour objects to 'unfounded' claims

A lawyer representing the neighbour who runs the pet-sitting service told Times of Malta that the claims made in the protest were unfounded and that his client was an animal lover who kept the dogs in “very clean conditions” as certified by animal welfare inspectors.

The neighbour would be filing a judicial protest against the couple on Monday, the lawyer said.