Yes, There Is A Solution – A Cull

In all, there were 31,920 dog attacks on people recorded in England and Wales in 2024 - a 2% increase on 2023, according to Freedom of Information figures obtained from police forces. And this may not even show the full picture, as three police forces did not provide useable data. All this is despite the XL bully ban that came into force in February 2024.

Because the ban should have been a cull of those wretched breeds, but despite the slant of this article, it hasn’t been totally useless:  

Vivien Lees is the anomaly. She works as a plastic surgeon in Manchester and is one of the only people we spoke to who believes the current system is working. Some of her patients are victims of bad dog attacks. Speaking about the XL bully ban back in April, she said: "We're still seeing serious injuries but some of the worst ones have been less common".

And most of the latest victims have been the friends and relatives of the lunatics that want these mutts, so, there’s that! 

The same thing happened, she said, when the original Dangerous Dogs Act (that banned four other dogs) was introduced back in 1991.

But many others we spoke to believe the law itself is flawed - not only the XL bully ban but the original 1991 law too.

Of course they do.  

The former Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote in a newspaper column, after leaving office, that the original Dangerous Dogs Act had been "rushed through Parliament and has gone down as a model of atrocious legislation". "By trying to outlaw types of dogs, rather than the actions of dog owners and dog breeders, the Act ushered in a nightmare world of pseudo-scientific dog eugenics, where officials would use calipers to measure parts of the dog's anatomy to determine the breed," Johnson argued.

Anything the fat useless blowhard says after leaving office can be ignored. If only we'd ignored him when he was in it. 

Certainly, some of the criticisms of the original law apply equally to the amendment that covers XL bullies - including the point of the view that the most irresponsible owners don't bother to comply with it.

And most useless police farces don’t bother enforcing it or acting on complaints. It's a factor of almost every one of these incidents. 

Thousands of pitbull terriers, banned under the original act, are still in the UK. Even while writing this article, we saw a sizeable XL-type dog being taken on a walk in Leeds city centre, its muzzle pointlessly dangling off its collar despite this being one of the requirements of it being out in public.

And did you alert the police? No? Why not?