Adriano Larobina and Thomas Sorahan were each imprisoned for 10 months by Queanbeyan Local Court yesterday after being found guilty of committing serious acts of animal cruelty.

The two 26-year-olds continue to maintain their innocence of any involvement in the incident, in which a syringe was used to inject one of the animals with an unknown substance with the act of cruelty recorded on a video camera.

On the recording, a man's voice, alleged to be Larobina's, says, ''He loves it, he'll be pinging in no time.'' The bodies of the animals were never found.

Police prosecutor Rod Gordon told the court that the case was at the upper end of the scale of animal cruelty offences.

''I don't think I've ever seen a worse case of animal cruelty,'' the prosecutor said.

''We can only imagine what was in that syringe when the ferret was injected.

''This was an intentional act by adults to inflict great pain and ultimately death on these animals.''

The court heard that Sorahan, a real estate agent with Canberra firm Wright Dunn, in May last year shared a Jerrabomberra house with Andrew Bell, who owned the ferrets Trigger and Cooch.

The ferret breeder, who told the court he had fitted his yard so his pets could not escape, said he returned home from work one Monday to find his ferrets missing, water on the garage floor and the house smelling of ferret.

He said when Sorahan arrived home after drinking with Larobina he was drunk and carrying a camera.

Mr Bell later found images on the camera of his ferrets in the garage and on his kitchen bench.

A ferret's leg was in an unnatural position in one image, as though it was broken or dislocated, and a film clip on the camera showed a ferret held down and injected with a syringe. Two other men in the clip have not been identified.

Sentencing the pair yesterday, Magistrate Brian Van Zuylen described the contents of the photographs and animal rights activists wept. The magistrate told Sorahan and Larobina that they had shown no remorse or contrition for their acts.