DOG lover Karl Dewar was fined £2,500 and ordered to pay £800 costs for smuggling his pets into Britain without having them checked for rabies.

He drove straight past customs after returning home from Spain through the Channel Tunnel with his pet Jack Russell and chihuahua in the back of his van.

The dogs should have had a Government licence and been held in quarantine for six months.

Dewar, of Gladstone Court, Headington, Oxford, was tracked down after a tip-off led to an investigation by Oxfordshire and Bucking- hamshire Trading Standards officers.

At Oxford Magistrates' Court yesterday, he admitted landing two dogs contrary to the Rabies Order 1974.

Dewar, a jobless telephone engineer, caught a Channel Tunnel train home last year after 18 months living with his girlfriend in Marbella, Spain, the court was told.

He claimed he "inadver- tently" failed to declare the dogs after customs officers did not check his van.

Graham Jones, prosecuting on behalf of Oxfordshire Trading Standards, said: "Rabies is an extremely contagious disease and can be transmitted to human beings. The outcome is usually death. "I suggest that by bringing the dogs through he thought he had avoided the controls. This avoided them being taken from him and the £3,000 quarantine fee."

The dogs were tracked down to Dewar's Headington home and his girlfriend's address in Brill, Bucks, last October after an investigation costing more than £1,500.

They were impounded and will be released in April. Neither was found to have the deadly disease.

Dewar said there had not been any rabies in Marbella for 35 years. He said: "I am being portrayed as someone who has put society at risk. But I care about society. I did not break the law deliberately. I was amazed when I was allowed through at Dover."

He added: "God forbid that I be the one who introduced that horrible disease into this country."

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