Straight to the point

“Vast!” Jason shouted, which means fix in place, “Vast!”. And a muscled black-and-tan Malinois with titanium-coated canines locked on to my left arm.

It was an otherwise quiet afternoon in Kentish suburbia. In a woods tucked away from the Barratt Homes and play park, I stood in a bite suit, pressed against a tree, as my old friend Jason shouted instructions at Max — his “AK-47 on a leash”. On command, Max switched from belly-rubbed playfulness to locked-jaw aggression and then back again in an instant. This, Jason assured me, is controlled ferocity, not wanton aggression. Most of the time, he said, Max could end a situation without even needing to bite.

One challenge with working dogs is teaching them to retrieve small objects without swallowing. “Once they get used to copper pipes, you move them on to keys and then finally to bullets,” Jase explains, placing a bullet in Max’s titanium teeth. “Don’t get me wrong,” Jase says, “they do look good, and the bite does hurt.” He smiles, setting down his joint to pry open Max’s mouth. “But it’s also for the protection of the dog.”

Jason started buying, training and trading dogs back in 2020, after serving three-years in prison for possession with intent to supply. He got the idea from a mentor inside, who offered him the old line from Mark Twain: “If you do something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” “I told him that’s why I sold drugs,” Jase jokes, but was encouraged by these words to start a business selling XL Bullies.

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In bold black lettering, Jase has his old Bully logo tattooed on his arm. But by late 2021, sensing a shift in attitudes towards the dogs and oversaturation in the market, he changed the business name and shifted to working breeds. “The Bully game,” he explains, “stopped being about the confirmation of the breed — proper build, temperament, and genetics — and became more about rare coat colours.” He wasn’t surprised when XL Bullies were banned last year. But also thinks this sort of legislation is pointless. After all, as Jason’s own story attests, those so inclined to own dangerous dogs will simply create hybrids or switch to new breeds.

Max, then, is a highly trained animal with a certificate in KNPV: the Dutch program for training police dogs. The Netherlands has a long history of producing elite working dogs, and KNPV is regarded as the gold standard — with police, security, and military forces worldwide seeking dogs from the program. Jase himself is in talks with a sheriff’s department in Texas to sell on some of his well-trained pups.

Such transatlantic connections aren’t typical in Ashford: the town Jase and I grew up in. It’s not the poorest place in the country, but it’s hardly thriving. Like much of Kent’s former patchwork economy, it faced a “late and steep” process of de-industrialisation; and Britain’s broader shift to a service-based economy has left Ashford a provincial non-place — a transport-link feeding London. Those who can escape via education and a job in The City do, while those who stay behind contend with cultural and economic depreciation. Skilled manual work exists, but the idea of a well-paid job embedded in the local community feels, to many, unrealistic — or at least lacking in prestige.

Dead high streets and busy job centres are a fixture of provincial Britain. Which makes one wonder, if Ashford can breed extremes of despondency, how many more Jase’s might exist across the country? Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the highest rates of fatal dog attacks and illegal dog fighting — grim proxies for social decay — are recorded in our most deprived former industrial heartlands: in Yorkshire, Merseyside, South Wales, Greater Manchester, and the West Midlands.

Often enough, owning high-drive dogs, with bloodsport origin, is used to elevate status while signalling an affiliation with a nonconformist subculture. In recent years, dangerous dogs have become stylised commodities that signal hyper-masculine bravado and criminal chic on social media. But at its best, taming dangerous dogs is a way of experiencing risk and developing the self while making a living; and the lines between garish signalling and self-development aren’t always clear.

XL Bullies were the gateway drug to life as professional dogmen for a few of my hometown friends. And Ashford is hardly exceptional. Jase works with dogs full-time, whilst another friend, Conor, breeds micro bullies and trains Cain Corso’s, alongside his day job as a groundworker. Both participate in trials and title events across the country — where handlers demonstrate their dogs’ skills for certification and cash prizes.

As well as training protection dogs in KNPV, Jase makes money from litters (he gets “stud rights” for the pick of the best dog) and runs a parallel business training domestic pets in obedience and corrective behaviour. Untrained Malinois pups, he tells me, sell for a few hundred pounds while the highest price he’s fetched for a trained dog was £5,000 — a domestic protection sale to a Belgium breeder. The protection dog business is lucrative and growing, with trained dogs becoming a must-have for A-listers and high-net-worth individuals. Some dogs are sold for as much as $250,000.

Interestingly, owners of domestic protection dogs are disproportionately female. Many women, often with experiences of stalking or domestic abuse, are drawn to the “ultimate confidence” a personal protection dog provides. Jase isn’t surprised. “It’s not like walking around with a knife or a gun,” he says, “you can’t get pulled over, but you’re safe at all times.”

“If I ever got in trouble,” Jase says, touching the wood of a park bench, “having my dog activate without advancing can shut down or deter most situations without him even having to bite.” He cited rising violent crime rates, an inability to police the border, and increases in sexual assaults, stabbings, robberies — “all sorts, all over London” — as justification for more citizens to invest in a dog like Max. Leviathan loses his monopoly on violence when he fails to protect his subjects.

Despite the lingering trappings of his past — like the habitual weed smoking, and ankle tag for firearm charges on his leg — Jase was keen to impress on me the safety, legitimacy, and family friendly aspect of the protection dog business. Nonetheless, even after he showed me videos of his two-year-old daughter holding Max on the leash, with himself as the “decoy” in the bite suit, I was reluctant to suit up myself.

But after he was called off my arm (“Los” for let go), Max didn’t show the least interest in me. “When all that energy gets channelled into an outlet,” Jase says, “you have a stable dog, but when you have high-drive dogs that are sitting indoors and not doing nothing, they get bored and frustrated… Every dog has a purpose,” he finished, “but people have tried to domesticate them too much”.

There’s a video on Jase’s Instagram overlaid with dance music. Clad in an all-black bite suit, he holds a replica submachine gun inside a shot-up American bus, parked in a field in Kent. Caravans and Heras fencing frame the background as a Malinois leaps through the bus window from an assault course outside, latching onto Jase’s bicep before hitting the floor. Jase spins around, pointing the gun at the dog, which writhes like a piranha on his arm.

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This cartoonishly Snatch-esque exhibition — complete with guns, caravans, dogs, balaclavas, and a backing track — is in a sense, just boys with dangerous toys in a (bite-)suit of organised production. Even from behind a screen, the adrenaline and carnival excitement — along with the social capital gained from playing the villain and demonstrating virility — are palpably seductive, and surely an essential part of the pursuit’s attraction.

But the same could be said for any kind of military practice, extreme sport, or martial art; all often serve as a methadone for wayward young men on a joyride through life without direction. Each answers a deeper need to assert something more fundamental about one’s worth, especially pertinent as industrial forms of identity have been eroded and status for non-university-educated men feels increasingly out of reach. In provincial towns where purpose and status are in dwindling supply, the delinquent need for structure is a more pressing problem than its bourgeois opposite: the metrosexual yearning for mud.

High-drive dogs kept in unsuitable environments have defined the pattern of attacks in recent years — an apt metaphor for men in post-industrial communities drawn to dangerous animals. Despite recent legislative interventions, this demand for dogs that project strength — whether as weapons, symbols, or protectors — has far from disappeared. As Jase suggests, the law has its limits. Especially in places without attractive pathways to success, new status dogs will emerge. And the latest have “bites like lions”.

***

Names have been changed and identities obscured.

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