Ana Paun, 11, was walking to a shop near her home in Bordesley Green, Birmingham on September 9 when she noticed a large dog staring at her. Frightened, she tries to walk away but the dog, which does not seem to be on a leash, grabs her arm. A passerby rushed to help and the animal released its grip for a moment before biting Ana again, this time on the shoulder. In footage captured from the top deck of a nearby bus, Ana can be seen rushing into a nearby store. People are running in all directions but the dog appears calm, almost playful, as he chases a 20-year-old man across a gas station forecourt and drags him to the ground.
In the two decades from 2001 to 2021, the number of fatal dog attacks in the UK averaged three per year, but since then the risk has tripled. Ten people – including four children – have been killed by dogs in 2022, and five have already died this year. Three-quarters of all dog killings in the past three years were caused by the same breed that attacked Ana: the American Bully, also known as the XL Bully. A variation of the American pit bull, originally bred in illegal fighting rings in the United States, it is powerfully muscled and weighs 60 kg or more.
As images of the Birmingham attack spread social networks the minister of the Interior, Suella Bravermantweeted that she had “ordered urgent advice” on adding the XL Bully to the list of banned breeds (even though it was actually Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary Thérèse Coffey, who bears this responsibility; Coffey has not yet made a statement on this matter). Keir Starmer agreed that there was a “strong case” for banning the breed. Emily Thornberry went further, telling LBC that the dogs should be “rounded up” and “put down”.
The XL Bully inspires passionate opinion; its shape and musculature evoke the predators who tore our ancestors from their caves in the Hobbesian past. Tens of thousands of years ago, we formed an alliance with one of these species (a type of wolf, long extinct) and thus began the process of further domestications, which led to the agriculture and civilization. We still accept a certain amount of violence as inevitable – tens of thousands of people are killed or seriously injured by cars every year – but a dog chasing people in a British city represents something else. It is the violation of a deep taboo, the ancient nightmare of claws and teeth reconstituted from our oldest ally.
At the same time, the XL Bully is something very modern. The most relevant question one can ask about this dog is not whether it should be banned (any sane society will choose the safety of its children over the right to own a particular breed of dog). pet) but why it spread so quickly.
The answer to this question is not, as some commentators have suggested, a matter of gang membership or culture; the National Crime Agency told me that any links to organized crime were tenuous or “weak”. Instead, it has more to do with technology and economics. The XL Bully is a monster of the Internet.
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In the thousands of American Bully videos uploaded to YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, one of the dominant themes is that the owners of these animals don’t identify simply as people with pets. They consider themselves “breeders”, running “kennels” (which are often just a simple redeveloped garden), and their conversations revolve around developing their dogs’ muscles and ensuring their fertility and financial value of their animals. A dog is never described without reference to its “lineage”; descendants of well-known animals, whose names include “Champion Homicide” and “Muscletones Legend Slayer”, sell for a high price. Some buyers are required to sign agreements to meet strict conditions regarding the number of times the dog can be used for breeding and the names – as part of the brand identity – that can be used.
It is also common for videos to discuss the money that can be made from puppies, which can sell for £3,500 or more, or by offering male dogs for breeding at around £2,500 per session . Videos from various “kennels” propagate the idea that owning a few XL Bullies is a hobby that comes with a six-figure turnover.
It sounds like easy money, but the only way to win is to persuade others that they too can make large sums of money by purchasing an XL Bully. The business depends on supply from what are known in financial markets as “big fools”: investors who will continue to demand the asset or security simply because that’s what everyone else is doing.
As is the case with many internet get-rich-quick schemes – multi-level marketing, meme stocks, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin – the only way to turn a profit is to use social media to become an advocate public and persuade others to join.
It’s an old pattern: very few of those who paid huge sums for tulip bulbs in the Netherlands in the 17th century had any real interest in horticulture. What interested them was market dynamics. The XL Bully Market is a sort of Ponzi scheme, although it has terrible consequences.
This is evident in the stories of XL Bully owners, including a father whose 17-month-old child was mauled to death by the dog he had purchased a week earlier in hopes of making a quick profit. Many XL Bullies are not even hosted by their real owners, but are “co-owned” by people who take a share of the profits: the technology effectively increases the return on capital by outsourcing the complicated task of hosting them. an extremely powerful and dangerous animal to someone with less capital of their own.
The failure to understand the real economics of the XL Bully may explain the political failure to regulate and control the spread of these animals. Charities such as the RSPCA and Dogs Trust are campaigning against “breed specific legislation”, which they see as discriminatory (perhaps charities are encouraged in this way because their funding depends in part on bequests from dog owners). In Parliament, the Dog Advisory Welfare Group, a cross-party group of MPs chaired by Labour’s Rosie Duffield, has since 2018 called on those campaigning against the breed ban in Parliament to entrench the idea that no dog is born bad.
This is a fallacious debate. All that matters is the damage the XL Bullies inflict when they decide – for reasons that will remain unknowable and immaterial – to attack humans. Either we remove these animals from society, or we accept that around ten people a year are killed (and many more injured) in circumstances of the most extreme pain and fear. The XL Bully as a political problem is not the creation of nature or nurture, but the point where a long period of stagnant incomes and bad jobs meets the strange economics of the Internet.
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