By Theresa Rézeau 

In 1820, an eighteen-year-old Edwin Landseer painted two enormous dogs standing over the body of a man.

The traveller lies almost buried in snow. His head has fallen backwards, his body apparently without strength. One dog paws urgently at the snow covering him while looking towards the distance. The other bends close to his hand. Far behind them, figures approach through the Alpine landscape.

Everything about the dogs suggests physical power. Their heads are enormous. Their bodies dominate the vulnerable human figure beneath them. Yet there is no ambiguity about what Landseer wants us to feel.

Relief.
The dogs have come to save him.

Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873), the British painter who would become celebrated for his representations of animals, exhibited Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveler in 1820. The monumental oil painting, measuring 189 by 237 centimetres and now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, makes canine strength central to its drama.

But the painting also does something more interesting.

It turns physical power into reassurance.

The traveller is helpless precisely because the dogs are not. Their size becomes protection. Their strength becomes service. The animals physically capable of overpowering a human being have become the creatures upon which his survival depends.

Two centuries later, the powerful dog can produce a very different response.

A broad head, immense chest and muscular body may now be read not as reassurance but as warning. In Britain, highly publicised attacks involving powerful dogs and the political and legal controversy surrounding the XL Bully have changed the cultural environment in which such bodies are seen.

The body has become an image of risk.
But what can an image legitimately tell us about danger?

We are remarkably quick to turn appearance into biography. A muscular dog becomes aggressive. A muzzled dog becomes dangerous. A large head becomes evidence of temperament.

The body becomes the verdict.
Yet rejecting that assumption does not require us to pretend that physical capability is irrelevant.

It matters enormously.

In 2024, the UK government’s Animal Sentience Committee described the fundamental problem plainly: large and powerful dogs can cause serious or fatal harm, and their strength can make them extremely difficult to restrain. The committee also raised questions about how dangerous dogs should be identified and whether breed-specific legislation is the most effective approach to preventing attacks.

Those two positions are not contradictory.

A dog can possess considerable capacity to cause harm without every individual dog of that appearance being dangerous.

This is where the image of risk becomes complicated.

What is an animal capable of doing?
What will this particular animal do?

They are different questions.

The first concerns capacity. The second involves behaviour, experience, environment, management and circumstance. Responsible ownership requires us to take the first seriously without pretending that appearance alone gives us certainty about the second.

British law has attempted to draw its own boundary around that uncertainty.

The XL Bully was added in 2024 to the prohibited types under Section 1 of the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991. In England and Wales, possessing one without a valid Certificate of Exemption is an offence. The law also reaches beyond prohibited types: under Section 3, the owner or person in charge can commit an offence if any dog is dangerously out of control, regardless of breed, including on private property.

That last point matters because the home is often imagined as the opposite of danger.

It is where familiarity is supposed to create safety.

A dog sleeps on the floor, waits beside the kitchen, recognises footsteps at the door and becomes woven into the rhythms of domestic life. Its physical capabilities have not disappeared, but familiarity changes how they are perceived.

The extraordinary becomes ordinary because it is loved.

Most of the time, that intimacy is precisely what companionship means. But affection cannot substitute for judgement.

A home contains visitors, children, elderly relatives, food, noise, excitement, other animals, open doors and moments in which attention disappears. No domestic environment is completely predictable.

For the owner of any powerful animal, responsibility therefore requires an uncomfortable question.

What happens if control fails?

The answer should influence the decision to own the animal long before anything goes wrong.

Not every dog is appropriate for every household, just as not every person is equipped to manage every dog. Physical strength, experience, training, living conditions and the vulnerability of people and other animals sharing the environment all matter.

This is not an argument against loving powerful dogs.

It is an argument for taking their power seriously.

There is another responsibility here, however, and it belongs to human beings.

The dog did not design itself.

For centuries, humans have selectively bred dogs for qualities we desired: speed, endurance, hunting, guarding, retrieving, companionship, appearance and strength. We decided which characteristics were useful, beautiful or impressive.

Then we created images that taught people what those characteristics meant.

Landseer understood this extraordinarily well.

His Alpine mastiffs are not merely studies of canine anatomy. He places their bodies within a human story. Size becomes moral because the narrative tells us how to interpret it. The enormous dog is not simply strong. It is benevolent. Its power exists in the service of vulnerability.

Strength becomes protection.

That should make us cautious when the same visual process operates in reverse.

Once a type of dog becomes associated with serious attacks, individual animals can begin carrying the accumulated history of incidents in which they played no part. One body comes to represent thousands. An animal can become a symbol before it has done anything at all.

Fear can flatten individuality.
Sentimentality can flatten reality too.

It would be equally irresponsible to insist that because an individual dog is affectionate, physical capability no longer matters. Familiarity does not eliminate strength. A history of calm behaviour cannot guarantee every future circumstance.

The difficult position lies between fear and denial.

It also requires acknowledging the people whose lives have been changed by serious dog attacks. Discussions about breed, legislation and animal welfare can become so abstract that the victim disappears from view. Severe attacks are not theoretical events. They leave physical injuries, bereavement and trauma behind them.

Animal welfare and human safety therefore cannot be treated as opposing moral concerns. Responsible policy has to contend with both.

That balance remains contested.

In its November 2025 report, the Animal Sentience Committee concluded that some dogs clearly present dangers to humans and other animals, while also finding that inadequate data had prevented policymakers from fully understanding the welfare impact of adding the XL Bully to the prohibited list. It called for better evidence about dog attacks and the effectiveness of different approaches to prevention.

The government responded in March 2026 that the prohibition followed an unacceptable rise in dog attacks and what it described as the disproportionate involvement of XL Bullies in that increase. It maintained the ban while accepting several recommendations aimed at strengthening the evidence available for future policy.

The disagreement is important because certainty is seductive.

It is easier to believe that danger can simply be recognised on sight.

If the dangerous body can be identified, then risk appears containable. Draw the boundary around the body and the problem seems to have acquired a visible shape.

But responsibility is rarely so simple.

A small dog can bite. A large dog can live without attacking anyone. Yet when a powerful dog does attack, its physical capacity may radically alter the consequences.

The relevant question is therefore not whether appearance means nothing.

It is how much appearance can tell us.

This is where Landseer’s painting becomes unexpectedly contemporary.

Look again at the traveller.

He is almost entirely at the mercy of animals far stronger than himself.

Landseer does not disguise their power. He exaggerates our awareness of it. The scale of the painting, the mass of the dogs and the vulnerability of the fallen man all depend upon the imbalance between them.

But power itself is not the villain.
The painting asks what power is for.

That question belongs as much to human beings as to animals.

Dogs do not decide which characteristics humans will reproduce. They do not create markets around intimidating appearances. They do not turn themselves into symbols of status, masculinity, protection or fear. They do not decide which household they enter or whether the person who acquires them has the knowledge, strength, time and environment required to manage them.

We make those decisions.
And when they fail, both humans and animals can pay for them.

This is why ownership is too weak a word for what responsible companionship requires.

Stewardship comes closer.

To own something can mean simply to possess it. To be responsible for another living creature requires something more difficult: recognising its nature without reducing it to that nature.

A powerful dog should not have to be imagined as a monster before its strength is taken seriously.

Nor should it have to be imagined as harmless before it can be loved.

Responsibility occupies the space between those two illusions.

It asks us to recognise capacity without predicting guilt. To protect human beings without pretending that every animal sharing a particular appearance has the same behaviour. To care about animal welfare without diminishing the suffering of people who have been attacked.

Above all, it requires decisions before the crisis rather than explanations afterwards.

Some tragedies appear sudden because the final event happens quickly.

Responsibility begins much earlier.

It begins with breeding, acquisition and training, with the environment into which an animal is brought, and with recognising who else shares that environment and what could happen if control failed.

Landseer painted his mastiffs more than two hundred years ago, their immense bodies bending over a vulnerable man in the snow.

He expected their strength to reassure us.

Today, the powerful canine body can provoke another response entirely.

What has changed is not simply the dog.
The image of risk has.