Sometimes the realisation that you’ve been completely wrong for decades creeps up on you slowly, and at other times it’s a revelation, a light illuminating the entirety of your foolishness all at once. I had a revelation of this second sort on the London Overground train.

I’ve been on the Bullys’ side but seeing one nose-to-nose with your child helps clarify things no end

It was just days before poor 68-year-old Esther Martin was mauled to death by two XL Bully dogs in Clacton-on-Sea. Beauty and Bear, the dogs were called. The train had just pulled out of Haggerston station and my son was with me. He was hanging from an overhead bar and I was pretending not to notice, so as to be with my phone. In my peripheral vision I saw him drop from the bar then sink into a squat, stretching out his arm, offering the back of his hand to a dog to sniff.

In as much as I was aware of it, I felt pleased. Almost from birth I’ve taught him the right way to approach a dog: don’t grab, let them come to you; don’t bring your hand down on them from above, let them sniff. No British boy should cower from a dog. It gives me the illusion that I’m teaching my city child country ways, and helps with the guilt that he has neither a sibling nor a pet.

It took me a few seconds before I realised that my son was inches from an unmuzzled XL Bully. Bullys are popular in my part of town. Some 40,000 are now licensed across the UK, and I’ve seen a fair few in the month since the ban became law. I see signs of them too: the plastic seats of the swings in the local playground are pocked with toothmarks. Swinging your Bully from the mouth improves their jaw strength no end. 

I’ve never before thought to worry, I’ve been on the Bullys’ side; but seeing one nose-to-nose with your child helps clarify things no end. Up close, they’re impossibly, breathtakingly large. This one was waist height, broad as a young hippo, and looked tense. It was standing, lead at full stretch, some distance from its owner, who had headphones on and seemed to be asleep.

I have in the past stood up for pit bull types, imagining it makes no sense to demonise one breed. Other dogs, Jack Russells and collies, for example, attack just as frequently. It’s not an XL Bully’s fault if it’s the gangster dog of choice. But looking at this one, over the head of my only child, I saw how wrong I’ve been. There’s just no defence against a dog this size – nothing any human without a firearm could possibly do. As Esther Martin was being savaged, several desperate neighbours took to beating Beauty and Bear about the head with spades, to absolutely no effect. In Birmingham last year, an XL snapped its lead with ease and pursued and savaged passers-by the way big cats on the African plain pursue deer. Would you let young men keep leopards?

So I’m a keen new supporter of the mandatory muzzle for XLs, but how are we to enforce it? Should I have politely approached the sleeping owner and lifted his headphones: ‘Excuse me, did you know that the law now requires you to muzzle your dog?’ Or perhaps I should have left the train and called a copper – but what would he have done? If our breathless and bearded officers find burglars too stressful to pursue (and they do) what chance of them tackling an unmuzzled Bully? And how can they even be sure which dogs to police?

The sofa-sized Presa Canario for instance, which in Spain is bred for dog-fights, is still legal here and I’ll bet my bottom dollar no ordinary cop could tell the difference. The owner of Beauty and Bear, an Ali G-type called Ashley Warren who has released some touchingly awful hip-hop, has freely admitted that his dogs were Bullys, but still the police said that ‘work needs to be done’ to confirm which breed his dogs were, and that this work will take ‘some days’. If the police has a recruitment problem now, just wait until it announces that young officers will be expected to take cheek swabs of suspected XL types for later DNA analysis. The ban does pose ‘logistical challenges’ for officers, a chief constable, Mark Hobrough, said on Monday. Sure does.

If I’ve defended pit bull types in the past, it’s because I grew up with one, and it was charming. My father had a large orange pit bull called Brigand. It was his favourite child by some margin and it was unarguably a great dog. My father would wait for it to clamp its jaws on a branch and then would whirl it around his head, demonstrating both the dog’s strength and his own. ‘They never let go,’ he’d say proudly, as Brig’s muscled frog-legs whirled by. ‘The only way to get them to release something is to push it further into their jaws. Make them gag.’

I considered this on the train. What if it’s your child’s leg the dog has hold of – do you push that further in? Brigand was a special dog, but he was also, typically of pit bulls and their XL cousins, an emotional dog. If he felt that he’d been treated unfairly, he’d sit in the corner facing the wall, occasionally looking back over his shoulder with a terrible wounded stare, until we understood the depths of the injustice that had been done to him. I’m sympathetic to the XL Bully owners who’ve been posting photos of their loving dogs, often nestled up next to young children. ‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly’, ‘Beast just loves the baby.’ Beast may well love the baby, but he might feel jealous of the baby too, and resentful. I can’t now recall quite why I thought emotional volatility was a persuasive point in defence of a dangerous breed.

Oddly, in all the arguments for and against XL Bullys over the past week, the person I’ve found most sensible is Ashley Warren, owner of the killer dogs. ‘I did not know Bullys were aggressive, I didn’t believe all this stuff,’ he said. ‘But now I’ve learned the hard way. I honestly thought the ban was a stupid government plan to wipe out a breed which I had never seen anything but softness and love from. Now I think they need to be wiped out.’