A baby girl who was viciously attacked in North Kerry by a dog suspected to be an XL Bully is seriously injured and receiving treatment at Cork University Hospital. The dog was since destroyed and the case is now under investigation by Gardai. This follows a series of highly publicized attacks by the breed in Ireland, most notably resulting in the death of Nicole Morey in June.
This comes less than a month after Minister Heather Humphreys announced a two phase ban on the breed, set to be implemented in October and February. The first phase bans the import, breeding, sale and rehoming of the dogs, whilst the second phase will outright ban the ownership of an XL Bully, with the caveat that owners possess an exemption certificate, and can prove the dog is licensed, chipped and neuterered.
This move follows the announcement of UK-wide bans last year. As a result of this the American self-proclaimed “creator” of the breed, Dave Wilson, no doubt engaging in a defensive act of self-marketing, reacted by claiming that the proclivity of the dogs towards violence was a mere “stereotype”. More dubiously, he stated that the intention behind creating them was to create the “ultimate companion breed” with a “very docile temperament”. This is despite XL Bully dogs having said to be involved in half of all fatal dog attacks in the UK since 2020.
An extensive study (link provided) pictured above provided by Bully Watch UK goes further, suggesting that whilst the XL Bully represents less than 1% of the UK’s dog population, that the breed has inflicted 44% of all recorded attacks and 75% of deaths in 2023, and as a single breed the XL Bully is 270 times more deadly than the country’s overall dog population. A truly feral and dangerous minority, this undoes the tiresome argument that “bad owners” are the sole catalyst of their over-representation in violent incidents.
All the empathy in the world does not undo the reality of the immediate threat posed to other humans, especially children, as well as other domestic dogs who are far less genetically predisposed to violent behaviour than the XL Bully. By owning an XL Bully you are complicit in compromising social trust and safety as well as enabling the prosperity of a greedy cultural malaise that profits from that. You are cynically exploiting a pedigree of animal whose very existence is a cruelty unto itself and more importantly a threat to other humans and animals.
If there are breeds of dogs that don’t belong, because they’re violent, what about people? Are there races of people that don’t belong?
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Spoken like a true British Bully
People aren’t deliberately, selectively, successfully bred for extreme, random violence. These dogs are.
Well said. News of another death this time from a breed the XL bully is derived from. 33 year old man killed by his American bulldogs, he owns four of them and the police are currently hunting for two of them. Why anyone in an ordinary house would want four dogs like that I do not know.
I think if you have one of those dogs and it harms even your own child you should face prosecution and certainly there should be a total ban on them being in a home where there are young children even as visitors. I hope the baby recovers from the injuries, that’s a truly terrible thing.