A cruel mother has been found guilty of subjecting her young son to a decade of daily beatings and humiliations.

Christine Copley picked on her third son Andrew as he was growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s and imposed a regime of painful and needless punishments.

She succeeded in hiding what she was doing from teachers and social workers by moving Andrew from her home in Exeter to her parents in Chagford if he had visible bruises.

Copley gave Andrew so little food he was sometimes forced to eat dog biscuits or hamster food to survive. The family home was filthy with uncleared dog mess on the floors and Andrew was bullied at school because he smelled.

Her assaults did not always take the form of conventional beatings, although she did whip him with a dog lead and hit him with implements including shoes.

Copley also twisted Andrew’s fingers or arms, held her hand over his mouth and nose, squeezed his genitals, or hit him in parts of the body where the marks could not be seen.

She sometimes put him in a cold bath after a beating to try to reduce the visible bruising.

Andrew and his younger brother were often locked into a dark, dirty under-stairs cupboard as punishments and he was sometimes stripped naked and made to stand outside the house.

Copley also employed emotional blackmail, threatening to abandon Andrew’s Jack Russell on a country road unless he sobbed for mercy and told his mother he loved her.

On one occasion she stopped while driving back from Chagford and threw Andrew out of the car. She pretended to drive off and was laughing when she came back to pick him up.

The daily attacks started when he was about five or six and carried on until he ran away from home at the age of 14 after his mother had attacked him with a bottle.

The beatings started when the family lived at Hurst Avenue, Exeter and carried on when they moved to homes in Farm Hill, Exwick, and Burnthouse Lane.

Copley told a jury at Exeter Crown Court she had only hit the boy once and that his account of a nightmare childhood was untrue.

She was found guilty of six counts of child cruelty after the jury heard not only from Andrew and his brother but also from former neighbours and friends who witnessed her behaviour.

One of the neighbours said Andrew was ’the saddest little boy I ever saw’.

Copley, aged 65, now of Laburnum Road, Exeter, denied seven counts of cruelty but was convicted of all but one charge.

Judge Erik Salomonsen adjourned sentence and ordered a probation report. He told Copley: ’You made your son’s life a misery. I am making no promises about your sentence.’

He released Copley on bail and will sentence her on April 28.

During a week-long case Andrew Copley told the jury he had endured a nightmare childhood in a filthy and squalid house with little or nothing to eat.

He said his mother resented him because she wanted a girl instead of a boy the abuse made him want to die.

He did not tell social workers about his treatment because he feared receiving even more serious beatings at the hands of his mother.

He said: ’She was violent every day. After a while I stopped crying when she beat me. She wanted me to cry and it was my way of getting back.’