Dangerous Dogs: We're asking the Wrong Questions

Last week, Panorama asked whether the XL Bully ban is working. It’s a reasonable question, but it’s the wrong one.

The right question is this: why, after thirty years of breed-specific legislation, billions of pounds spent, and thousands of dogs seized and destroyed, are bite incidents still rising across every breed? Not just the banned ones, all of them.

If banning dangerous dogs worked, it would have worked by now. We banned the Pit Bull, and for good measure the Dogo Argentino, Japanese Tosa and Fila Brasileiro. Now the XL Bully, and already the Cane Corso and the American Bulldog are filling the gap. The pattern is the same every time, and every time we respond in exactly the same way. The definition of insanity, as the saying goes.

Something else is going on and nobody in this debate, on any side of it, is looking in the right place.

Let me be clear about something uncomfortable: both sides of this argument are wrong.

The pro-ban camp says certain types are inherently dangerous and no amount of good ownership changes that. The anti-ban camp says it’s all in the raising, and any dog can be safe with the right owner. Both positions contain a grain of truth, but both are dangerously incomplete.

Here’s what the science actually says. A landmark 2019 study of over 14,000 dogs across 101 breeds found that breed accounts for roughly 9% of behavioural variation in individual dogs. Just nine percent. The remaining 91% is down to individual differences within breeds, not between them. Genetics matters, breed matters, but it doesn’t determine the individual animal in the home.

What does determine that individual is far more complex than either camp wants to admit. It’s the line the dog was bred from, it’s what that dog has learned, and it’s their physical health, their gut microbiome, their diet, their pain levels, their nervous system. It’s the environment they were raised in, and the human on the other end of the lead.

Breed gives us probabilities, not certainties. A Border Collie is more likely to herd than a Basset Hound, but not every Border Collie will herd – and within Border Collies, the variation in drive, intensity and temperament is enormous. The same logic applies to every breed on the banned list.

Here is what the ban doesn’t want you to look at too closely.

The dogs that kill are not a random sample of their type, they are almost always the product of a specific process: a breed becomes fashionable for the wrong reasons – status, intimidation, profit. Extreme physical characteristics get selected for. Inbreeding intensifies to fix the look quickly and the gene pool shrinks. Genetic instability accumulates, dogs start flipping and people die. Government bans the type, then the market moves to the next breed. The cycle begins again.

The XL Bully case makes this visible in a way that is hard to ignore. There is strong evidence that a significant proportion of serious and fatal attacks linked to this type trace back to a single dog – an American animal called Killer Kimbo, so inbred he had the same great-grandfather four times over, whose bloodline now runs through an estimated half of all XL Bullies in the UK. That extreme look became fashionable and profitable, particularly within criminal networks where status and intimidation were part of the appeal. Killer Kimbo is not an anomaly, he is the template. Different breed, same story, every time.

The response? Ban the type (that’s a lot of dogs). Seize the dogs (that’s a lot of money). Destroy the ones whose owners don’t comply (not necessarily the dangerous ones…).

Between February and September 2024, police seized over 4,500 suspected banned dogs across England and Wales, resulting in the destruction of 850. Kennelling and veterinary costs – which stood at £4 million in 2018 – rose to £25 million in the first year of the ban alone. The government provided £9.5 million to support enforcement and kennel spaces hit capacity – court cases being heard in early 2026 are those that entered the system in early 2024, dogs sitting in kennels at £1,000 a month, waiting for a court date that was over two years away.

All of that. And the next breed is already being overproduced in someone’s back garden.

We are spending tens of millions of pounds removing dogs from the street. We are spending nothing on understanding why those specific dogs became dangerous in the first place.

And that is the question that could actually change things.

If the most dangerous dogs share a pattern – extreme inbreeding, selection for physical intimidation, rapid expansion of a genetically narrow population – then it is entirely plausible that they also share something biological. A genetic mutation affecting pain threshold, a heritable predisposition to gut dysregulation that compromises serotonin availability, or a lowered excitement and prey drive threshold, or a neurological instability so deeply embedded that the dog is in constant, unidentified agony - and nobody knows.

A dog in chronic pain is a dog with a hair-trigger we know this, the research is stark: in one study, 75% of aggressive dogs had musculoskeletal pain. Across studies, at a very conservative estimate, 1 in 3 dogs referred for behaviour complaints have at least one underlying painful condition – in some studies this rises to 4 in 5. We already know pain drives aggression in ways that have nothing to do with breed or training. We just haven’t asked whether some of these dogs are structurally predisposed to it due to inbreeding.

If we found the gene mutation – or the cluster of mutations – that identifies genuine instability, we would have something precise to work with. Not a type, a look or a guess. We could identify affected animals early, remove them from the gene pool through castration and management, and where necessary make the case for euthanasia on the basis of evidence rather than appearance. We could prosecute the breeders producing them with something more specific than ‘they looked the wrong shape.’

Instead, we are destroying dogs based on how blocky their heads are, while the breeders who created the problem sell the next litter to the next person who wants to look hard, or worse to unsuspecting person that believes that dogs are what you raise them to be...

The money exists. The science exists. The will does not.

There is a parallel failure running alongside all of this, and it is making everything worse.

The public, the owners just trying to do right by their dogs, are navigating an advice landscape that is almost entirely unregulated. Social media is saturated with hobbyists who call themselves trainers, platforming confident, simple, often completely wrong guidance to audiences of thousands at low cost. The dominant ideology – reward-only, always, for everything – gets promoted with evangelical fervour. Question it and you will be publicly shamed.

I want to be precise here, because this matters: all effective behaviour work is reward based, and that is not the point. The point is the complete exclusion of everything else – the health assessment that should come first, the breed and line knowledge that shapes what a dog actually needs, the understanding that some dogs carry genetic drives and emotional requirements that need safe outlets, structure and containment as well as reward. A working-line dog that has never been given the containment its genetics demand is not a training failure, it is a lifestyle failure, and a dog in pain being managed with treats is not being trained – it is being failed.

Hospital admissions for dog bites more than doubled between 1998 and 2018. Dog attacks rose 34% in the five years to 2023. Deaths from dog attacks rose from 2 in 2019 to 16 in 2023. The reward-only ideology became dominant across that same period. I am not drawing a causal line here, I am saying that the current approach – across legislation, across training culture, across public advice – is not working, and that the ones most harmed by that are the dogs and the owners who trusted the wrong voices.

The public deserves better than this. They deserve access to robust, evidence-based guidance from a multidisciplinary approach, a group of people who collectively understand the whole animal – body, mind, genetics, history, relationship – not just the behaviour presenting in front of them.

What concerns me most is not the dogs, it’s who is deciding all of this.

The people making life and death decisions about individual animals, and shaping legislation affecting millions of them, are politicians, police officers, and welfare organisations. Not one of those groups is trained in behavioural genetics. Not one has the expertise to evaluate neurochemistry, epigenetics, or the complex interaction of physical health and behaviour that actually underlies these cases. They are responding to public pressure, media cycles, and the last fatal attack that made the front page.

We wouldn’t let a politician decide how to treat cancer based on a documentary, and we wouldn’t ask a police officer to determine whether a bridge is structurally safe. But we are letting exactly those people determine the fate of hundreds of thousands of dogs – at enormous public expense – while the scientists, geneticists, and behaviourists who might actually have answers are nowhere near the conversation.

That is the scandal. Not the dogs.

There are no easy answers here, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

Some dogs do pose a genuine risk. Morphology matters – form creates function, and a dog built for power will always cause more damage than a dog that isn’t, if things go wrong. The argument isn’t that breed is irrelevant. It’s that breed alone is not the answer, and the current framework – react, ban, seize, destroy, repeat – is a policy built on fear, not evidence.

What an evidence-based approach would look like: mandatory investigation of fatal and serious attacks to identify specific causal factors, not just type. Genetic research into heritable instability across all the breeds following this same pattern. Regulation of breeding lines and prosecution of those who produce dogs for intimidation. Proper pain and health assessment as the first step in any aggression case. Transparency in the advice landscape - so that dog owners can tell the difference between evidence-based guidance from experienced practitioners and confident ideology from someone with a ring light and a following. At present there is no minimum requirement to call yourself a dog trainer or behaviourist in the UK. Anyone can, and the loudest voices are not always the most qualified ones.

The dog in front of you is a body, a mind, and an emotional being. It has a genetic history, a physical condition, a learning history, and a relationship with the human holding its lead. Dangerous behaviour doesn’t come from a breed label, it comes from a perfect storm of factors that we have the tools to understand – if we were prepared to look.

We’re not looking. We’re banning. And it just isn’t working.