Dog breed · United States
The American Bully is a modern breed of dog that was developed as a companion dog, and originally standardized and recognized as a breed in 2004 by the American Bully Kennel Club (ABKC). Their published breed standard describes the dog as giving the "impression of great strength for its size".
The majority of major international kennel clubs do not recognize the American Bully as a separate breed, including the UK Kennel Club, the American Kennel Club, and the International Canine Federation (an international federation of national kennel clubs and purebred registries). On July 15, 2013, the breed was recognised by the US-based United Kennel Club (UKC).
Temperament in adult dogs is highly dependent on training, and the breed can be very demanding and needs to be properly trained. Due to its size, strength, aggression and the frequency with which it is involved in lethal attacks on humans, legal controls on the ownership of the breed exist in several countries.
Temperament: Bully breeders believe that an individual Bully's temperament depends on their breeding and training. Many dogs, despite acting as lapdogs in the home, do well in sports such as weight pull and flirt pole. Human aggression is discouraged in breed standards. Breeders have acknowledged that American Bully dogs can be very dangerous if improperly raised or bred.
Appearance: The United Kennel Club (UKC) and American Bully Kennel Club (ABKC) breed standards are similar, except the ABKC recognises four varieties of size, based on height (the Standard, Pocket, XL, and Classic), whereas the UKC recognises only one standard size.
All dogs are classified and shown as Standard until they reach a year of age, at which point they are separated into the varieties and shown against their own type.
Health: As the American Bully is a novel breed there is minimal information on health. A type of congenital ichthyosis exists in the breed and is similar to a form that occurs in the American Bulldog. According to the British Veterinary Association, Mild-hip dysplasia is part of the breed standard for XL-bullies.
History: The American Pit Bull Terrier (APBT) was the foundation (parent breed) used to create the American Bully. The APBT has maintained a characteristic appearance and temperament for over a century, with different strains of APBT emerging within the breed, each with different physical attributes. One particular APBT strain was crossbred to create a stockier physique that breeders originally misrepresented as purebred APBTs. Eventually, enough breeders agreed that these dogs were disparate enough from APBTs that they should be called a different breed altogether.
The American Bully, as it is now known, began development in the 1980s with the majority of the final behavioral and aesthetic product being completed in the 1990s. The breed was first recognized by its breed club, the American Bully Kennel Club (ABKC), in 2004. This registry first acted as a means to document pedigrees and show the breed against its written standard. According to the ABKC, the initial desire for this breed was to produce a dog with a lower prey drive and more of the "bully" traits and characteristics than the American Staffordshire Terrier. Mass and heavy bone was prioritized to ensure such a look, and due to this many of the dogs shown today display the wide front for which they were originally bred. The United Kennel Club state that, although American bullies were an outgrowth of the American American Pit Bull Terrier, several other breeds were used to attain the muscular look breeders desired; including the American Bulldog, English Bulldog, and Olde English Bulldogge.
The American Bully Registry states that the breed was bred to be a companion dog, and that breeders have made efforts to reduce "gameness" (the instinct to fight other dogs) in the breed. According to Bullywatch, the XL-Bully lines present in the UK are extremely inbred, due to the small founding population imported in 2014–2015. Many of these lines originate in an American dog called Kimbo, which sired a large number of dogs that displayed unpredictable aggression towards humans.
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