A WOMAN who cut off the heads of her two pet snakes with a pair of scissors while staying at a house in Church Stretton has been given a suspended prison sentence.

Four days before the attack Jennifer Lampe was said to have drowned a hamster in a fish tank because it was noisy and kept her up at night.

Magistrates at Telford heard that 28-year-old Lampe had previously dumped and abandoned two tabby cats and given away a puppy to a stranger in a park because she did not want to look after them.

Lampe appeared at court last week for sentence having pleaded guilty to two charges of causing unnecessary suffering to an animal at an earlier hearing.

She was given a four-month prison sentence suspended for two years and banned from keeping animals for five years.

Passing sentence, magistrate Sue Tyrrell described the incident with the snakes as particularly unpleasant and bizarre.

Lampe, formerly of Prees Heath, Whitchurch, and now living at Shropshire Street, Market Drayton, will also be under supervision for a year and was ordered to pay £100 court costs.

The court heard the incident happened while Lampe was living at her sister's home in Essex Road, Church Stretton, in April this year.

Roger Price, prosecuting on behalf of the RSPCA, said Lampe had been at her sister's home for about a year but there was friction because she did not like her sister's boyfriend.

Matters came to a head on April 8 after the defendant had consumed a quantity of alcohol and became hysterical.

Lampe took scissors and a knife from the kitchen and went to the bedroom where she kept the two snakes - a boa constrictor which was about two metres long, and a bull python.

The police were alerted and arrived to find the defendant with the boa constrictor around her neck, still moving but without its head.

"She had the two heads of the snakes in her jogging trouser pockets. The small snake was in her bedroom, also decapitated," said Mr Price.

Lampe told police she had done it because she feared her sister was about to throw her out of the house.

At the time she had been seeing doctors because her sister believed she was suffering from schizophrenia and other mental health issues.

Sarah Cooper, for Lampe, accepted that it was a "nasty case" but said her client was a 'loner' and had a number of mental-health problems and had tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose since the first court hearing.