04/04/2026
Dear Government (open letter),
Hi. It’s me again. Your favourite dog expert here with my uninvited opinion of how your messed this up in the worst possible way. Again.
Yes, XL bully type dogs are back in the headlines… and what did you expect?
You restrict the outlets of a high-drive, powerful dog and then act surprised when behaviour deteriorates. Reduced exercise and environmental enrichment are associated with increased fear, arousal and problem behaviours in dogs, and frustration from blocked goals is a well-established pathway into reactive aggression (Hall et al., 2014; McGowan et al., 2018; Hecht & Miklósi, 2014).
You then remove the most responsible dogs from the gene pool. Under UK law, exempted XL Bullies must be neutered and breeding is prohibited. That means the owners most likely to select for stable temperament and invest in good rearing are legally excluded, while demand for the type does not disappear. When demand persists under prohibition, supply shifts underground, where welfare and selection pressures typically decline (Defra, 2024; Hiby et al., 2006).
You make the dog illegal and in doing so increase its appeal to the exact demographic you do not want owning it. UK research on “status dogs” shows clear links between ownership of powerful breeds and identity, intimidation and antisocial signalling. Prohibition can increase that appeal rather than reduce it (Maher & Pierpoint, 2011).
You then try to enforce all of this using a system that cannot reliably identify the dogs in the first place. Visual breed identification is repeatedly shown to be unreliable, even among professionals, with poor agreement and frequent misclassification. So enforcement becomes inconsistent by default, and media reporting built on visual ID is often wrong (Voith et al., 2009; Olson et al., 2015).
So the outcome is predictable. You increase frustration in restricted dogs, drive breeding underground, remove the best genetics from the legal population, glamorise the type to high-risk owners, and rely on a classification system that lacks reliability.
That is not a behaviour solution. That is policy theatre.
Luv, Jo x
