Just three months after a grandma was mauled to death by an XL bully, a mother has been killed in a fatal dog attack in her own home.
The woman in her 50s, named locally as Angeline Mahal, was brutally savaged by her two registered XL bullies at her home in east London. Her harrowing death comes after a new law introduced on February 1 made it a criminal offence to own one without an exemption certificate in a government crackdown following a spate of horrific attacks.
And from December 31 last year, it also became illegal to sell, give away, abandon or breed an XL bully. Yet one expert doesn't think the law goes far enough, and says the breed will continue to kill 'because it has been bred as a commodity with only one purpose in mind'.
Criminologist Dr Simon Harding, who has carried out extensive research on status dogs and authored a book about it, argues there is no stopping the XL bully, which he says has been hard-wired to possess aggressive traits combined with an excessively muscular build to make it the status dog it is.
Young men have created a 'Frankenstein dog' as a result of their twisted breeding, the expert says, and devastatingly, some female relatives of breeders and owners have borne the brunt of their evil training practices.
Dr Harding, Director of Criminology Services Limited, sympathises with the 'deed not the breed' argument, often touted by animal charities such as RSPCA, which is the principle that there is no such thing as a breed that is bad by nature. However from his experience interviewing young men in gangs, the dogs have been conditioned to act violently, he says.
"Any dog can be a loving dog. But of course, if you treat it in a particular way, you train it in a particular way, it's going to develop characteristics and attributes which are the complete polar opposite of that," Dr Harding, 63, told the Mirror. "They're going to become violent. They're going to become aggressive. First of all, aggressive to other dogs than aggressive to humans.
"And that's exactly what a lot of young people, young men, who have these dogs are trying to achieve." Citing an example, he says if a Pitbull is crossbred with an XL bully, it can produce a litter of 10. If a breeder chooses to train up the biggest two and breed them again, it creates a chain reaction.
"Each time it's almost like a ratchet effect that you are constantly training in and breeding in aggression and violence. In three, four, five years, you're going to arrive at a significantly different place," he explained. "Some of these dogs are almost like 'Frankenstein' dogs. They have been created to achieve a particular effect and serve a particular purpose and it's absolutely ghastly.
"We have to ask ourselves ‘why are people doing this?’ Ultimately, they're not the type of dogs that are going to sit on the couch with you and play with the kids, you're going to create something that is a hair trigger in terms of aggression and violence and it becomes so violent it's manstopping.
"It is so big, so heavy, so ferocious, it will take a man to the ground, never mind what it would do to women, elderly, children. What I have found is sometimes women have them more for protection. But then, sadly, as we've seen yesterday, they can turn on you."
What makes a status dog
Dr Harding, author of Unleashed: The Phenomena of Status Dogs and Weapon Dogs, says the dog has to be of a certain height, weight, and posture to be a status dog. It has to be muscular, of course, and project a certain image.
"You can amplify that image so you can train it to make it even more muscular, with perhaps even more kind of bow legs. You can crop the tail, you can crop the ears, you can enhance it in a way that then enhances your image with it," he listed.
"So you can adorn it with collars, studs and spikes. You can put it on a leash, which is not really a leash, it's more like a chain you would anchor a ship with and what you're hoping to achieve with that is a dog that will control the immediate public space around it. People will move out of the way. They will cross the road. They will give you space.
"It also demands respect, but it also has a sense of being not only violent but unpredictably violent. And that is the image that some of these young men want to achieve."
'Commodities and bodyguards'
Dr Hardings says that social media has played a huge role in the rise in popularity of XL Bully dogs. It has provided opportunities to trade them, at the same time as boosting the 'hard' image and reputation of those owning them, with young men posing with the dogs in photos.
The expert says within the gang world, the breed is used as 'minders'. "They're used as bouncers and they're used as bodyguards and security, and they're used to help collect drug debts. "Visual brands are communicated with these dogs," he explained. He says convicts get into the world of breeding them for high profits because of the high demand.
Last year, it was revealed that drug kingpin Thomas Rayment was running Muscletone Bullys UK - a company selling bulked-up Bully puppies - from behind bars while serving six years in prison. Dr Harding says breeders can make £600 to £3,000 per pup.
A third motive for some young men to own bullies is the hard cash from fighting. The expert says there are three tiers of dog fighting in Britain - the lowest level being ‘off the chain’ fighting. This usually consists of mates meeting in a park and getting their dogs to fight to determine 'who's stronger'.
The scraps, only lasting a couple of minutes, will earn owners a low sum such as £20. He says this happens in parks every day. The next tier is fighting as a hobbyist, usually someone with a well-connected network of other owners and breeders. They might transform a space in their yard or in their garden and earn a few thousand pounds on fights.
The third level is the international professional dogfighter, where spectators fly in to witness the bloodshed, with thousands at stake. An example of the brutality that can take place behind closed doors within the underworld was highlighted in the April court case which found parents Billy and Amy Leadley guilty.
The couple played host to an international deadly dog fighting ring in the garage of their secluded family home in the leafy village of Takeley, Essex. They had cleared out their garage and fitted it with cages and a 12ft x 8ft pit.
The pit, they claimed, was for birthing, but blood splatters from at least five different dogs proved they were secretly using it as an "arena" for the twisted spectacles. "If you really want to get into the breeding game or the fighting game, you can make money from these animals," Dr Harding continued.
"Unfortunately, the ban that we have now will not really get rid of that. It only drives it underground. The only real asset that the ban will have is for what you might call the 'average Joe' public person. They might think Bullies are all the rage but it might prevent casual owners from taking on that type of dog."
He added: "For others, the dog becomes a commodity. It's there to do a purpose, and if it doesn't serve the purpose, they’ll kill it or abandon it or rehome it. When we have an animal, we think of it as being a sentient being, we treat it as part of the family.
"Many of these men that have these types of dogs don't really view it in that way and they soon realise the dog cannot be contained in that way. So they can afford it, they can’t exercise it enough, they can’t feed it enough. The dog becomes unruly and unwieldy.
"They’re going to feed them steroids, vitamins and products to make them a muscly monster or a land shark. I've seen young guys fawn over these dogs and the minute it doesn’t serve its purpose of making them look good, they tie it to a bench and walk away."
Attacks on women
Armed officers were called to a home in Hornchurch, London, at about 1.10pm on Monday following reports of a "critical incident". The woman, believed to be in her 50s, was unable to be saved and the dogs were removed from the scene.
The victim has today been named locally as mother Angeline Mahal. A neighbour of the victim - who was said to have been known as Angel - said: "She was a pleasant woman, very lovely. You could hear the dogs barking, but I never saw them."
Her death comes just three months after grandma Esther Martin, 68, was killed by an XL bully when she was visiting her grandson in Jaywick, near Clacton-on-Sea, on February 3. Essex Police destroyed two dogs and arrested Ashley Warren on suspicion of dangerous dog offences. He has been released on bail.
According to the Office for National Statistics, last year there were 16 deaths due to dog attacks, which is a sharp rise from previous years. At the end of 2023, around 60 per cent of dogs held in police kennels were some kind of bull breed.
Natasha Johnston, 28, was mauled to death while walking a pack of dogs in January 2023 and was believed to have been killed by her own pet - an American Bully XL. A post-mortem examination showed she died from shock and haemorrhage, and her left jugular vein had been perforated.
In 2022, there was also a string of fatal XL Bully attacks, with the youngest victim being Bella-Rae Birch, one, who was mauled to death at her home. She was attacked in March only a week after her family bought the American Bully.
In the July, Joanne Robinson, 43, was fatally mauled by her pet Rocco at her home in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Speaking after her death, her mum Dot said her daughter had paid £4,000 for the Bully from a breeder in Doncaster that she saw advertised online.
Grandma Shirley Patrick, 83, died in hospital 17 days after being mauled in a violent dog attack at an address in Caerphilly in December 2022. After the incident, four people were arrested on suspicion of being in charge of a dog dangerously out of control causing injury.
Commenting on the latest fatality, Dr Harding said: "We don't know the details for this case yet, but you tend to find young men are involved in the buying, the selling, the breeding, the fighting. But because of various challenges around exercising the dogs, and walking them at night without them being seen, sometimes the dogs live in tower blocks or the dogs are moved around.
"Sometimes these boys will give the animal to their mums or to their gran and they'll say, 'I've got to go to work. Could you look after the dog?' That's where these awful, dreadful events happen. I almost call them accidents, but they're not because they're almost predictable.
"Many of the women who have died have been relatives looking after the dog, often looking after children as well. So they’ll have the dog in one room and the children in another and they can end up crossing that boundary and attacking whoever is looking after them."
On the latest trend, he added: "I've written about Pitbulls 10 years ago, and it's the same now with XL bullies. I've interviewed people breeding and fighting them and in five years time, these people will be fighting and breeding the next version. It's a scourge in society and there's a real core of people that like to do this kind of thing and it's ghastly and it is a real danger to the general public."
