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The American Bully is a loosely-defined dog breed most easily identified by its massive head and cartoonish muscularity. It is said to have originated by cross-breeding the fearsome and notorious American Pit Bull Terrier with the larger but similar-looking American Bulldog and Olde English Bulldogge.

American breeders classify it by size. They range from smallest to largest as the Pocket, Classic, Standard, and XL. To qualify as an XL, an American Bully must weigh at least 100 pounds. By contrast, American Pit Bull Terriers range in weight from 35 to 60 pounds. Since the American Bully has no specific genetic markers, it is not recognized as an official breed by the American Kennel Club, the United Kingdom’s Kennel Club, or the International Canine Association. As a heuristic, think of an XL Bully as an American Pit Bull Terrier jacked-up on anabolic steroids.

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The XL Bully is frequently associated with hip-hop culture in America and criminal culture in the UK.

Richard Barker, a surgeon with England’s National Health Service, says that XL Bullies can cause wounds more severe than all other dog breeds, with a bite that’s able to crush bones. Although Wikipedia claims that the XL Bully is “estimated to only make up a few thousand of the also estimated 13 million dogs in the UK,” they were responsible for ten out of 19 dog-related deaths in the United Kingdom between 2021 and 2023.

In December 2023, England and Wales added the XL Bully to the UK’s Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991, making it illegal to trot out the dog in public without a lead and muzzle. Owners had until midday on December 31, 2023 to either file an exemption or risk having their dog euthanized.

Until last Tuesday, a 23-year-old white woman named Nicole Morey lived in Ireland, which was not subject to last year’s ban on XL Bullies. Like far too many young women, Morey appeared to spend far too much of her time posting digitally-altered selfies. In the waning days of 2022, she posted a meme on Facebook predicting that in 2023 she’d marry a black guy, buy a house with him in 2024, get pregnant with their first mixed-race child in 2025, have their first mulatto baby in 2026, and have two more mulatto babies in 2027. A TikTok video from late 2022 has obnoxious hip-hop music blaring in the background as it shows Nicole using some sort of blackface filter to make herself appear black.

Judging from the videos she posted, Ms. Morey lived in a small apartment with four dogs, all of which appeared to be derived from some gnarled branch of the Pit Bull tree and one of which was an XL Bully.

In a TikTok video she posted last December that she’d captioned “My boy,” Nicole is shown dancing in the kitchen with an impossibly muscular and clearly uncomfortable dog whose head is bigger than hers. On the audio track, a man defiantly proclaims:

This is my son, and I don’t give a fuck if you think he looks aggressive. I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like the look of him, and I certainly don’t give a fuck if you think the breed should be banned.

In another video from July 2023 that features a montage of Nicole with her dogs, the voiceover says:

Do you know why the universe didn’t allow our pets to speak? To teach us that love and loyalty come through actions and not words.

In another TikTok video tagged “dogmom,” the impossibly corpulent Ms. Morey is shown handing treats to two of her dogs.

A video posted in July 2022 shows her menagerie of killer dogs as a song plays with the lyrics: “but if one of us dies . . . I hope I die first.”

On May 26 of this year, her final post on Facebook was: “A good woman will always win in the end. Remember that.”

She didn’t win in the end, nor did she ever squat down and squeeze out a menagerie of half-breed children, but at least two of her dogs graciously granted Nicole her wish to die first.

Last Tuesday marked Nicole Morey’s 23rd birthday. According to the UK’s Mirror:

Nicole Morey was mauled to death just moments after returning home from her 23rd birthday party, with armed police unable to save her despite quick action from bystanders. . . . Two of the canines, one of which is believed to be an XL bully, leapt at her as she walked through the front door at around 11.30pm on Tuesday. One man, witnessing the incident, called the police as she was subjected to the horror mauling, with armed officers descending on the scene. . . . Ms Morey had reportedly lost an arm and was already dead when emergency services arrived, and police were forced to shoot one of the dogs at the scene. The remaining three were subdued with pepper spray.

A source with the Irish police says that all four of Nicole’s dogs have since been destroyed.

The man who witnessed Nicole being ripped to shreds appears to have been a male partner who lived with her. Since at least one source describes Nicole as a “young mum,” she may have had at least one child with this man, but I could find no other indication in news reports or social-media posts that she had any children. Nearly all of her social-media posts show her to be either alone, with her dogs, or hugging elderly relatives. The only post I could find where she’s cradling a human infant in her arms describes the baby as her “godchild.”

Apart from the unidentified male partner, the rest of her family witnessed Nicole’s death the way most people witness most real-life events these days — digitally:

Nicole Morey was brutally attacked and killed by her own XL Bully dog as she celebrated her 23rd birthday — it has now emerged that her family watched the incident unfold on CCTV. . . . The family of a woman who was mauled to death by her own XL bully as she celebrated her 23rd birthday have been subjected to horrifying footage which captured the brutal attack. . . . It has now emerged that devastated loved ones of Nicole witnessed the incident on footage captured on CCTV. A source told the Irish Independent: “This woman’s family were unaware of what had happened until one relative was sent the graphic video showing the attack.”

Nicole’s grand-uncle Anthony O’Donnell told the Irish Mirror:

There’s two young girls here and they know her and they said she used to treat them (the dogs) like babies. They said she used to have Snapchats up and Facebook (posts) with the dogs inside in bed with her, that they were like her children. I said to them this morning it just goes to show you can’t trust dogs. You can’t trust any dog, but especially those dogs — they are bred to kill.

Nicole was well aware that the XL Bully was considered so dangerous that the UK had officially banned them, but as the soundtrack voiceover proclaimed on that clip where she danced with one of those dogs in her kitchen, she didn’t “give a fuck.”

At the risk of sounding judgmental, I feel that some of her relatives should have been more aggressive in warning her that “Around dogs with strong jaws and muscular backs . . . never relax!”