Why XL bully ban hasn’t stopped the massacre: Victims inform how canine with ‘demise of their eyes’ are STILL mauling victims – and why an inbred ancestor referred to as ‘Killer Kimbo’ plus the ‘worst doable canine homeowners’ are responsible

Nobody thought that a ‘family-friendly’ dog like Hunter would ever be a danger to baby Arabella.

The 18-month-old puppy would regularly join the infant in her travel cot, nuzzling and sniffing at her before wandering off.

‘We used to think he was like Scooby Doo,’ said one female relative.

But on Wednesday last week, Hunter ‘just snapped’. What followed was like a scene from a horror film as the dog attacked the eight-month-old in a frenzy of violence, biting her so badly that she had to be airlifted to hospital with injuries that left her fighting for her life.

Arabella Williams’s mother, who had tried to prise the dog’s jaws apart as it tossed her daughter around ‘like a rag doll’, broke a finger in the process.

When police arrived at the house in Hawkinge, near Folkestone, Kent, a firearms officer shot Hunter dead in the front room and neighbours later saw the dog’s corpse being removed in a body bag.

A 76-year-old woman and an 18-year-old man have been arrested on suspicion of being in charge of a dog dangerously out of control. The case raises some disturbing questions because Hunter was an XL Bully, a breed that many people assume was banned under legislation passed by the outgoing Tory government in February of this year.

But, while it is against the law to sell, give away, abandon or breed from an XL Bully, people who owned dogs before the legislation came into force were entitled to apply for an exemption certificate that would allow them to keep their ‘pet’ as long as it was muzzled and put on a lead in public.

You might have thought that this would solve the problem of people being mauled to death but far from it. The fact that the dogs can be kept unmuzzled at home means that owners and people who visit them – like Arabella – continue to be vulnerable. That adds up to a lot of potential victims.

When the XL Bully was added to the list of dogs banned by the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991, it was thought that there were about 10,000 of them in England and Wales, but that proved to be a huge underestimate.

No fewer than 61,000 owners applied for exemption certificates before the deadline lapsed and 55,000 XL Bullies have been successfully registered.

A BBC investigation this week revealed that an average of more than 100 dangerous dogs a month have been destroyed since the ban was introduced.

Freedom of Information Act responses from 19 police forces in England and Wales show that, in the first eight months of 2024, 1,991 suspected banned dogs had been seized, either because they were unregistered or had been involved in a violent incident. Of these, 818 have been put down.

Despite this cull, there are still tens of thousands of XL Bullies living in homes up and down the country. And what fearsome creatures they are. While they may not be as large as a breeds such as the Dobermann Pinscher, which stand up to 35 in (89 cm) tall, what they lack in height they more than make up for in terms of strength and ferocity.

Muscular and barrel-chested, their jaws are so strong that they have a bite force of around 305 pounds per square inch (PSI) – compared to a Pit Bull’s 235 PSI. As one NHS consultant put it: ‘Once they grip, they don’t let go.’

The XL Bully was developed in the 1990s by crossing American Pit Bull Terriers with other large, heavily muscled dogs, such as the American Staffordshire Bull Terrier and the American Bulldog.

To qualify as an XL, a male Bully must stand at least 20 in (51 cm) high at the shoulder, with female XLs only slightly smaller. Males can weigh anything from 70 lb to 150lb, which makes them a terrifying adversary.

While they make up less than 1 per cent of the total dog population in the UK, XL Bullies are estimated to have been responsible for at least six of the ten reported dog mauling deaths this year.

These victims include 41-year-old Michelle McLeod from Aberdeen, who was mauled to death by her XL Bully, Bailey, this month. The animal was seized by police and put down. It later emerged that Michelle had been charged with failing to control Bailey in June after he attacked a neighbour’s dog.

Her death came less than a month after ten-year-old Savannah Bentham died from neck injuries inflicted by an XL Bully at her caravan home in East Heslerton, North Yorkshire. The family had owned the dog for four years.

In May, 50-year-old Angeline Mahal was killed at home by her two XL Bullies in Hornchurch, east London. Three months earlier, in Essex, 68-year-old grandmother Esther Martin died after being attacked by two of the dogs while visiting her 11-year-old grandson. All the XL Bullies involved had been granted exemption certificates.

‘The law has not gone far enough,’ says Marie Hay, who is among a growing number of people calling for stricter regulations. ‘It might be working in public but it’s not stopped people from being attacked within their own homes. XL Bullies shouldn’t be kept as family pets. Ninety-nine per cent of these owners must know their dogs are temperamental. Anything can make these dogs snap.’

Marie and her two daughters were walking along the seafront in Redcar, North Yorkshire, in February last year when their pet husky Naevia was attacked by two XL Bullies.

They had just arrived at the beach when a man parked his car yards from where they were walking and opened his boot to release two large dogs, one brown and one silvery-white.

Marie was startled by their intimidating physiques and menacing body language. And she was right to be afraid, for just 30 seconds later they hurtled towards her and her girls and launched a vicious attack on their seven-year-old pet.

‘They were grunting almost like hogs,’ says 42-year-old Marie, from Middlesbrough. ‘One jumped on Naevia, ripping her shoulders and chest and then the other joined in. Naevia was screaming like a baby.’

It took Marie, her 20-year-old daughter Jessica and several members of the public to restrain the dogs which – snapping ferociously – sank their teeth into Jessica’s hand and injured three others. 

All the while, Marie was screaming for someone to get her other daughter, a terrified five-year-old, off the beach. ‘Those dogs wanted to kill Naevia,’ says Marie. ‘I looked at the brown one and there was pure death in its eyes.’

The savage attack was all the more horrifying because it went on for more than ten agonising minutes, ending only when Marie managed to put one dog in a headlock and their owner restrained the other.

But, for poor Naevia, the diagnosis looked bleak. Her chest had been ripped open, her kidneys were failing and she had lost vast amounts of blood. It took multiple operations, a dose of the painkiller ketamine and three different antibiotics to save her – a course of treatment that left Marie with a £30,000 vet bill.

In August, the owner of the two XL Bullies, John Pickering, was sentenced to two years in jail for being ‘in charge of a dog dangerously out of control causing injury’. Banning the 51-year-old scaffolder from owning any animal for life, the judge described the attack as ‘savage and despicable’ and Pickering’s XL Bullies have since been put down.

The attack on Marie’s family happened just eight months before Rishi Sunak announced he would outlaw XL Bullies.

The then prime minister was spurred into action by a series of vicious maulings involving the breed. Indeed, XL Bullies were responsible for around half of all fatal dog attacks in the UK between 2021 and 2023 – six of which were in 2022 alone. These included fatal attacks on ten-year-old Jack Lis in Wales in 2021 and 17-month-old Bella-Rae Birch in Merseyside a year later.

Driven by campaigners, including former law lecturer Lawrence Newport, former environment secretary Steve Barclay said banning the dogs was an ‘important measure to protect public safety’.

And yet, ten months after the Government acted, the attacks continue to happen. Gemma, a 22-year-old nursery teacher from Glasgow, was walking her 15-year-old chihuahua, Fudge, in October when a man with a tan-and-white XL Bully approached them. Without warning, the dog charged at Fudge and started biting him.

‘The man kept saying: ‘He’s just playing.’ But he couldn’t get him to stop,’ says Gemma. ‘When he finally let go, I grabbed Fudge. I knew at this point that there’s no way he was going to be saved; he had blood pouring out and his legs were all bent.’

A subsequent examination revealed that Fudge had four punctures to his body, both back legs were paralysed and his tongue had been ripped to shreds. He had to be put down.

Gemma says Scottish Police charged a man but she has not had any further updates.

The sentencing for a dog attack in the UK depends on the severity of the incident. If the dog injures a person, the owner can receive up to five years in prison, a fine or both. If a dog kills a person, the owner can be charged with manslaughter and face a sentence of up to life in prison.

Despite recent tragedies, Benedict Treloar, from the Campaign for Evidence- Based Regulation of Dangerous Dogs, maintains that the new law ‘has done a good job at preventing and reducing the impact of really severe attacks in public’. 

But the ban has been fiercely opposed by dog owners and animal welfare groups, such as the RSPCA and the Dogs Trust, which claim it is a ‘knee-jerk policy’.

XL Bully owner Sophie Coulthard and campaign group Don’t Ban Me, Licence Me resorted to legal action, arguing that the ban was unlawful because it was based on ‘unreliable’ material, lacked a ‘proper’ analysis of its impact and included ‘vague’ standards.

Coulthard, who is a recruitment consultant from Wandsworth, south-west London, insists that she has never had any problems with her two-year-old XL, Billy.

‘He’s just a really lovely, affectionate dog,’ she tells me. ‘He gets so much positive attention, especially when I take him out in a Christmas jumper.’

Coulthard believes a surge in dog ownership during the pandemic (it is now thought 13.5 million dogs are kept as pets) led to irresponsible breeding.

‘We need better legislation on the people who can breed and own dogs,’ she says. ‘If we had that, we wouldn’t be in this position right now.’

But at the High Court this week, Mrs Justice Beverley Lang dismissed Coulthard’s legal challenge, saying there was ‘sufficient evidence of an alarmingly high level of fatal attacks’ by XL Bullies or XL Bully crossbreeds.

‘People are in denial about XL Bullies,’ says Marie Hay. ‘Their owners claim that ‘in the right hands they’re gentle’. But it’s in their genetics, they’re brought up to be fighting dogs.’

Indeed, genetic research carried out by the BullyWatch campaign group revealed that half of Britain’s XL Bullies were descendants of an inbred dog named ‘Killer Kimbo’ from the US.

BullyWatch says that dogs related to Killer Kimbo have been found to be responsible for at least ten violent incidents worldwide and are suspected of being involved in dozens more.

Colin Tennant, a leading expert in dog behaviour and training, blames American rappers for glamorising these dogs, which have become a status symbol in recent years, with puppies selling for more than £2,500.

‘It’s inadequate men using a dog as an extension of their inadequate ego,’ he says. ‘They tell me: ‘Well, if I have a big dog . . . and somebody attacks me, I can defend myself.’ They’re often the worst dog owners. They want the dogs to be aggressive as a threat.’

I ask Tennant if it’s possible to retrain these dogs to be less vicious. ‘The crucial period is the first six months,’ he says. ‘After that, once the damage is done, it’s impossible.’

His recommends the introduction of mandatory dog-training classes leading to ‘a certificate after six months to say that you’ve got control over that dog on a lead and it has to be temperament-tested twice a year.’ If this test revealed a dog was becoming aggressive, the dog would be confiscated. He says such a system ‘could save millions of attacks’.

But Benedict Treloar insists that only a ban on XL Bullies will solve the problem and he’s not persuaded by the argument that it’s unfair to single out this breed.

While it will take some years for Britain’s XL Bullies to die out, the legal ban on breeding and selling them should mean that violent incidents involving this breed will become less frequent.

‘The number of these dogs within the canine population is not growing and will slowly decline as these dogs age out of the population,’ Treloar says. ‘In ten years’ time, hopefully, we will have no deaths from XL Bullies.

‘If the Government hadn’t acted decisively and ownership of the breed had continued to rise, we could have been seeing 20 or 30 dog deaths a year.’

This may be true but it will be of scant consolation to the families who have lost loved ones to XL Bullies since the ban came into effect.