What Is To Be Done about XL Bullies?
Clearly the much-loved British ban on XL Bully dogs has failed. It is widely ignored and people keep getting slaughtered and maimed by these disgusting animals and the people who harbour them.
As well as being living creatures, XL Bullies are commercially-produced lethal weapons. They have been bred specifically for random violence; this is not behaviour over which they have control or which they can be trained out of. They will for no reason simply go beserk one day and rip a granny's head open, and they have limited bite control - it is difficult for them to release prey after commencing to bite it.
There's apparently a private members bill in the House of Commons aimed at undermining the ban, which obviously is not going to pass. What *should* be done, though? I think it looks something like the following:
- Mandatory destruction orders when a breach of the existing law is committed
- A ban on stockpiling multiple dogs at the same address; stockpiling multiple dogs should be automatically deemed to be ASB within the meaning of the 2014 Antisocial Behaviour Crime & Policing Act
- Make all the offences in the Dangerous Dogs Act indictable when they relate to XL Bully Types, such that conspiracy/aiding-abetting breaches of the existing bans will themselves become offences
- Any "affected person" should be allowed to apply for a destruction order: affected persons would be any local authority where the dog is being harboured, any landlord or tenant in relation to the premises, any neighbour within 100 metres of the registered address, any parent of any school located within 500 metres of the registered address, any owner or employee of any business within 500 metres of the registered address.
- It should be an implied term, of any residential lease where a registered social landlord is a superior landlord, that harbouring an XL Bully on the premises is a breach of tenancy; an obligation upon RSLs to all affected persons to enforce such terms should be imposed, enforceable by a civil penalty payable to the complaining affect person.
- In my trollish heart of hearts I'd like to see XL Bullies recognised as an agent of biological warfare an explicitly included in the Biological Weapons Act 1974 but that seems a stretch (and Australians might start agitating for the cure to myxamatosis to be included too!)
Note: the 2014 ASB law is currently being partly re-enacted under a different name