Neighbours stand chatting casually on a suburban pavement, one holding his dog. The next moment, the mundane scene descends into the stuff of nightmares. In a video released by South Yorkshire police, which looks as if it has been caught by a doorbell camera, a 47-year-old man has a large black dog, tail wagging, on a lead. Seconds later, the man is being rolled across the road like a carrier bag tumbling in the wind. The muscular dog, perhaps disturbed when the man attempts to untangle the lead from his paws, leaps at him, and then, joined by a second large, loose dog, knocks him to the ground. A 14-year-old girl attempts to intervene, to a soundtrack of piercing screams.
The attack, which unfolded in Sheffield last autumn, left the man with deep cuts and puncture wounds, while the teenager suffered minor injuries. A man and a woman were arrested on suspicion of possession of a dangerously out-of-control dog. And the breed of the dogs? These days, when we think “dog attack”, we’re quite likely to picture an XL bully, the American breed whose jowly mugshots have glared under headlines of maulings and fatalities, and whose ban under the Dangerous Dogs Act came into force a year ago.
