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19 thoughts on “British Prime Minister Vows to Ban the XL Bully by the End of the Year After a Rising Number of Violent and Fatal Dog Attacks

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  1. Blah blah he say the same thing we ban pitbull because they’re dangerous dogs but we’re not doing much about it are putting any effort to stop people from owing pitbull. There are countless stories where people died by pitbull in the u.k but we don’t care enough to do anything about it because people stigmatized against pitbull it how you raised it the pitbull that killed people is because they have bad owners he trained him to be aggressive.

  2. How do you compare the deaths of hundreds of people from dog attacks to the death of thousands of people from pathogens spread by dogs, or hundreds of millions of people getting sick from pathogens, allergens and parasites spread by dogs?

    I was more horrified by the attack I suffered from our family dog when I was five and being attacked by other peoples’ dogs than I was by the eczema I suffered while we had a dog in our home. As a volunteer health and safety representative at the schools I taught at I learned of the scope of disease spread by dogs in human environments and came to believe this was a gbigger issue than the suffering caused by dog attacks. The scope is surprising.

    We had a teacher suffering respiratory infections. The only thing I could see was a lot of dog faeces outside his classroom. At the time I thought nothing of it because I thought faeces was a form of fertilizer.

    While reading health and safety research papers about a decade later, I came across research at Bari University and the University of Colorado in Denver that found about 50% of the pathogens found in urban environments came from dog faeces.

    I learned dog faeces has twenty times the pathogens, allergens and parasites of human faeces. The density of dogs in cities is over 6000 times greater than the density of wolves in natural environments.

    From sites of the EPA, CDC and WHO I learned the most common diseases humans get from dogs are gastrointestinal infections, respiratory infections and skin infections. I saw photographs of eczema that looked like what I had as a child. A few pennies dropped. That teacher with the respiratory infections was probably infected by dog faeces.

    If hundreds of millions of people are mades sick by pathogens spread by dogs, and tens of thousands of people die, per year, from those diseases, the death and suffering caused by the pathogens spread by dogs may be thousands of times what is caused by dog attacks. How do we put that into perspective?

    • I would like to learn the facts about this – it’s not something I hear much about. I know that my city closes the ocean to swimming after a big rain because the water becomes polluted by dog feces. And I have heard of toddlers going blind after canine fecal parasites get into their eyes.

      I wonder if we could improve the situation with education. We need more good, factual documentaries about the societal problems pet dogs cause.

    • I’ve noticed that I’m much healthier living in a home without any kind of pet.

      I also fail to understand the attraction of pet ownership. I mean, come on. It revolves around holding a creature in captivity and making it utterly and totally dependent on you. In essence, that’s slavery.

  3. The problem here isn’t that dogs bite.

    It’s that pitbulls *maul*.

    With BSL we will still have some dogs, for various reasons including idiopathic rage syndrome, genetic flaws or poor handling and even including that–the amount of *mauling* will drop exponentially.

    Dogs and humans have a symbiotic relationship and have since the dawn of humankind.

    We get all kinds of diseases from various domestic and non-domestic animals and have lived with that reality for hundreds of thousands of years.

    What we don’t do is make excuses for other animals, domestic or wild, behaviour when they willingly attack humans.

    We euthanize wild animals that attack villages and horses that kill their owners because that’s what makes sense.

    We don’t breed more of the domestic animals that are dangerous because that would be stupid.

    Oh wait…

    • Well said. And it’s staggering that the basic common-sense attitude toward domestic animals which prevailed for thousands of years has suddenly been totally subverted by this bizarre societal sickness of dog-worship. And I say that as someone who enjoys dogs and owns one!

  4. Makes sense. These XL American Bullies are basically pit bulls that have been mixed with aggressive mastiff breeds to make them even bigger, stronger, and, frankly, uglier.

    Just look at the dogs in those pictures. I usually like dogs, but those look like actual monsters (which I guess they are, given that they killed people).

  5. This website is about dog bites, not diseases allegedly caught from animals. People pick up more diseases from other people than from dogs.
    Maybe these “infected” dogs were infected by people.

    I get Pseudomonas skin infections. Who do I blame? The garden!

    A classmate of mine nearly died of a lung problem caused by a systemic fungal infection.
    The carrier was birds.

    Although children can get migration of roundworm larvae to the eyes, it’s not extremely common. I think how treatable it is depends on a correct diagnosis. In addition, there are treatments available which may be able to preserve vision.
    In the past, this diagnosis has been missed. Eyes with this problem have been enucleated due to the belief there was cancer in the eye.

    Furthermore, far more people die in automobile crashes than
    die from dog bites. Does that mean we should allow dogs to kill people. I think not.

    Nor do I think that COVID-19 came from dogs.

  6. its takes just a quick glance at these so called pedigrees to see what the problem is , I’m certain back in the day inbreeding was common place in part due to attempts to fix type and geographic isolation. But even back then they knew there was consequences , inbreeding of Bull terriers locked in deleterious genes hence the continued rage syndrome seen in those , the level of inbreeding combined with the original bloodstock being inbred itself is leading to implosion , basically overabundance of deleterious genes , to get UC Davis on the case and call out UKC and its inbreeding NO OTHER KENNEL CLUB ALLOWS THAT

    • Add into that, Kelly, that 90% of these monstrosities don’t breed naturally because the females may fight back and kill or maim the sire.

      The females are secured in a rape rack to make sure the stud is undamaged. This is similar to wolf dog breeding where the breeders peg out the female husky/GSD in heat and pray the wolf doesn’t kill her. If it does, oh well…NEXT!

      It’s barbaric.

      Add in the backyard breeders because these pitbull breeding simpletons don’t require nor check up on, breeding contracts. Nor, unlike actual good breeders, will they take back an unsuitable pup and refund the payment or offer a better litter pick next time.

      That’s why this has turned into such a sheetshow of malevolent pitbull/pitbull mixes.

  7. Nice to hear some good news for a change.
    I never understood why pit bulls were illegal but really big pit bulls were A-OK.

    I still don’t understand why a pit is legal if you call it a Staffordshire Terrier, a brand name made up by John P. Colby.

    If you do a search for him you find a bunch of pages talking about how his pit bulls were the best and won a lot fights. Somehow the Brits are convinced since they have a local name they are a homegrown and safe dog.

    They are not.

    Still if XL Maulers get banned it can only help save lives.
    Here’s hoping animal control finds a spine and enforces the new law rather than playing the name game.

    Not bloody well likely but I can hope.

    • Enforcement is the KEY here. All this whinging and whining from the Pitbull owners acting like somehow it’s all so egregious…

      We have BSL. I was dodging an idiot with a shorty and a regular pitbull. The regular pitbull started barking at my dog as we got on the bus. Not impressed.

      A few weeks later, same idiot–*another* regular-sized pitbull.

      The other day I was on that corner and he had, one XL, one shorty pitbull and two regular pitbulls, walking them altogether. He’s all of 5’8″ and 180lbs. If even one of those dogs went off, he’d be dragged through the street before he could stop them.

      And NONE of them had a muzzle. Not one. Also, it’s *illegal* without a kennel license in this city to own more than three dogs. And he lives in an apartment where he runs his dogs loose on their big front lawn. Clearly, the landlord isn’t enforcing any codes, either.

      So, that’s illegal kennelling, leash law breaking AND ignoring BSL with *four* dogs.

      Zero enforcement.

  8. Both major political parties in the UK back the ban:
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/suella-braverman-american-uk-government-government-rspca-b2412333.html

    “The decision has been backed by campaign groups, the Labour Party and Baron Baker of Dorking, who put the Dangerous Dogs Act on the statute books more than 30 years ago … Labour, while supportive of the ban, criticised the Prime Minister for “dithering” over bringing in restrictions on their ownership.”

    • Clearly (as long as they’ve funded and endorse enforcement) the Brits are smarter than we are.

      Which you wouldn’t think, given that they’re a super dog-loving culture that until a few years ago–often brought their dogs to the pubs for a night of partying and many had dogs wandering around leashless–yet they’re ahead of us.

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