A MAN had his ear ripped off by a vicious XL Bully – after the banned breed pounced on him while he was asleep.
Darren Shuttleworth-Long was brutally attacked by the dog, which he was looking after, after he fell asleep on April 26.
To his horror, the 52-year-old awoke to discover the dog’s jaw locked underneath his armpit.
Pancaking, Darren managed to get the dog off him but the hound came back for more and launched a second attack on him.
During the second attack the XL Bully bit Darren’s right ear, ripping it off.
Darren finally struggled away from the out of control dog and was rushed to hospital.
He spent three days recovering from the horror attack in the ICU (intensive care unit) at Bristol’s Southmead Hospital.
Darren is currently waiting to have his ear reconstructed with plastic surgery.
Wiltshire Police have confirmed that a 24-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of being in charge of a dog dangerously out of control and causing injury.
She has been released on bail pending further inquiries while police probe the horrific attack.
Darren, from Swindon, Wiltshire, said: “I went to sleep and had the dog asleep next to me.
“I woke up and it had latched on the side of me. I managed to move it off.
“It attacked me again and hit me on the side.
“I crashed against the bedroom door and locked myself in with the dog.
“He was having a go on my right ear. He bit my ear off.
“He hit me about eight to ten times – I thought ‘I’m in serious trouble‘.”
Darren says the attack was unprovoked and lasted for an agonising ten minutes before he was luckily able to escape the dog.
He added: “My whole right side of my face was numb. There was blood everywhere.
“It was pouring out of me. It was like a horror movie. My whole face was covered in blood. Half my nose was hanging off.”
After arriving in hospital he had what was left of his savaged ear stitched up.
He said: “The tissue had to come off – there was nothing to attach it to.”
He has since been recovering from the attack and now struggles with going out.
He said: “I can’t go anywhere near big dogs now.
“It’s a long lasting stress that will be there for the rest of my life.
“Dogs barking sends cold chills through me.”
Darren is currently waiting for the soft tissue left on his ear to harden before he can have an appointment with a plastic surgeon to look at reconstruction.
THERE are specific regulations in place that prohibit certain dog breeds from being owned or bred in the UK.
So what are the illegal dogs in the UK and why are they illegal? Here’s what we know.
Which dog breeds are illegal in the UK?
People tend to think of large, vicious dogs when they imagine being bitten by one.
But the truth is that many types of dogs are known to bite humans, whether provoked or not.
However, it’s important to remember that just because a breed tends to bite humans, that doesn’t mean that they all do.
British law determines five breeds of dog are illegal to own, breed, sell or give away.
These are an XL Bully, Pit Bull Terrier, Japanese Tosa, Dogo Argentino and Fila Brasileiro.
BEN Shenton was just 18 months old when his mother gave him up to a well-spoken blonde woman who swore she’d give him the best life possible.
Little did she know her decision would put Ben through years of abuse at the hands of a woman who believed she was Jesus Christ reborn.
Images of Ben show a happy young boy, but the reality was entirely different – as the youngster was forced to become part of a notorious cult known as ‘The Family’.
Anne Hamilton-Byrne, who Ben would grow up to know as his mother, became the leader of the cult based in Australia, which drugged and beat him.
He had no idea of his life before Anne, as she went to great lengths to keep his adoption a secret, even bleaching his hair platinum blond like hers and his new ‘siblings’.
Despite abusing more than 20 children, including Ben, Anne and her husband and cult co-leader, Bill Hamilton-Byrne, never faced justice.
Now, over four decades on from the abuse, Ben shares his story of growing up in the “Kai Lama” compound, where children were locked in with barbed wire and tortured.
Anne first started out as a yoga teacher before turning to a more ‘spiritual life’ and eventually believing she was Jesus Christ reincarnated.
She was born with the name Evelyn and had three marriages in total – the first coming to an end when her husband died in a car crash, which led to her ‘spiritual awakening.’
She met English physicist Dr Raynor Johnson in 1963 and the following year, they set up a group dedicated to spreading a surreal combination of Christianity and Hinduism, with Hamilton-Byrne at its centre.
Her final husband, Bill, became the person who led the doomsday cult with her in the 1960s, when the world faced existential threats like nuclear warfare, the Vietnam War and the spread of communism.
Anne was able to rope people into the cult through yoga lessons, meetings at her house once a week, and then three times a week, until she built the compound on land near her house for them to move into.
Anne came across as beautiful, well-spoken and nurturing, so it’s no surprise Ben’s mum was easily convinced he’d have a better life with her.
Ben said Anne manipulated his mother into giving him up in 1970, convincing her that ‘only she could give me the best life possible’.
The pair consistently preyed on vulnerable people like Ben’s mum, Joy, who had suffered a back injury and felt she could not look after him anymore.
They also started recruiting people into their cult by approaching patients from Newhaven Hospital in Kew, a private psychiatric facility run and operated by various members of The Family, who targeted vulnerable patients, subjecting them to heavy doses of LSD and electroshock therapy.
She and husband Hamilton-Byrne took children through illegal adoptions, allowing the cult to grow in numbers before imprisoning them in a strict home-schooling environment at a rural property near Eildon in Victoria.
Using lawyers, social workers, and doctors to forgo official channels, they were able to forge birth documents and raise over a dozen children to believe they were the birth children of the Hamilton-Byrnes.
When children were born inside the compound to cult members, they were raised to believe their birth mothers were instead among a handful of “aunts”, who gave out brutal punishments for whatever they saw fit.
From the outside, the family looked picture-perfect as they lived on their compound in Victoria, Australia.
Life at Kai Lama seemed healthy and even advanced for its years; it featured yoga, exercise, vegetarian meals, meditation and education.
Ben lived on the remote property and was raised alongside dozens of other children for 13 years and recalls living with 28 other kids at one point.
“Growing up, it was Anne and Bill, they were mum and dad; and then there were foster kids, and they were kids of other sect members, who would either come up on weekends or stay there for stints of a couple of years,” Ben, told the BBC.
“The greatest amount of kids at any given stage was 28,” he added.
Anne and Bill brought up the children as their own, even dressing them in matching outfits and dying their hair bleach blond to appear like a real family.
I loved them in their little smocks and jeans and the long hair and ribbons.
Anne Hamilton-Byrne
“We were her children. We were different ages. We’d line up von Trapp style (like) The Sound of Music, which we’d watch, dressed in outfits that matched and that was just what we were asked to do,” he told the True Crimes Conversation podcast.
“You look back on that and you see it’s choreographed.
“It crafted a belief that she had these children, which she didn’t. We were all either adopted or handed over.”
In an interview years after the children were finally taken from her, Anne said: “I wanted them to look like brothers and sisters – I must admit this.
“I loved them in their little smocks and jeans and the long hair and ribbons. It was beautiful – it was lovely to see.”
Asked why she imprisoned 28 children over two decades, she responded: ‘I love children.’
But in reality, the children were subjected to years of beatings, mind games, isolation, and forced to take drugs by the cult leader, who had convinced more than 500 people she was Jesus Christ.
The couple had convinced their followers they were making a ‘master race’ while teaching a mixture of Christianity and Hinduism.
Ben recalls one form of torture Anne liked to perform on the children was waterboarding.
It’s a method of torture that creates such horrific psychological pain that its use has even been banned in the US military.
“We were all lined up. We were belted. Our head held under the bucket of water, interrogated,” he said.
“Held there until you thought you were suffocating, brought back out again.
“Horrendous experience. It caused nightmares.
“These things shape your personality.”
Ben recalls seeing his siblings being beaten with a belt, and says they were given LSD ‘as part of an initiation ritual.’
“I was watching her being belted with a buckle and she’s being beaten to the point where she’s wriggling out of her clothes,” he said of his sister, Sarah.
“Hearing her body smash across the balustrades – it was horrendous to know they had the power to do that and would do it,” he told the MailOnline.
She had this ability to be able to be so warm, so loving, so caring, and yet at the same time so manipulative.
Ben Shenton
Ben says Anne’s most effective tactic was to keep the children from forming bonds with each other to keep them all in line.
To weed out misdeeds in the children, Anne would perform group interrogations by beating them until someone came clean. Ben said he stayed compliant to avoid punishment.
“This was the evil genius of her. She understood that if she could separate us, isolate us, make it so that we couldn’t build relationships with one another and punish us, then she could control us,” he said.
“Anyone who’s lived under domestic violence will know the living with fear, the walking on eggshells, the currying favour of those in authority, or the absolute rejection of them, the hatred of them, the love-hate relationship.
“It’s domestic abuse on steroids,” he said.
Now, Ben believes Anne was a sociopath or psychopath.
“She had this ability to be able to be so warm, so loving, so caring, and yet at the same time so manipulative,” he said.
It wasn’t until 1987 that the cult was finally searched by 100 police officers and the children were rescued.
At the time, a 15-year-old Ben was doing his scheduled yoga class when police stormed in.
His sister, Sarah Moore, had managed to escape the cult at 17 and headed straight to the police to tell them what was going on.
Not taking any chances, police stormed the property and rescued six children, including Ben.
While he was reluctant to go with them at first, he soon realised this was his path to freedom.
He recalls: “I think I got this epiphanal moment, realising this is the ticket out of here. So I just I let go, and I went with them.”
It was only then that Ben found out he was not their biological son and was handed over by his mother Joy, who stayed in the cult as an ‘aunt’.
At the time, Anne was in Hawaii while Bill stayed on the compound, but he wasn’t arrested.
Later, he went to New York to meet Anne before the pair were arrested and extradited back to Australia.
While many of the children came forward with claims of abuse, both Anne and Bill were only charged with conspiracy to defraud and perjury by falsely registering the birth of triplets.
The pair were spared jail and fined just £2,300 each for the crime.
Detective Lex de Man, who investigated the case, says evidence of abuse was unable to be taken to court despite multiple victims coming forward.
Justice was not done.
Ben Shenton
Detective de Man recently told The Age: “My only regret is she was never held totally to account for the misery she caused to the former cult children.
“I have no sympathy for the woman I consider the most evil person I ever met in my police career.”
Ben moved into foster care when he left the cult, and while lying on his bunk bed with fresh pyjamas and a meal in his tummy, he realised he’d never go back to The Family again
“I realised then I (didn’t) have to do this anymore, I’m free. I don’t need to go back,” he said. “That, to me, was when I shut the door.”
Four decades on, Ben is a proud husband to Rajes and a dad to Ellie and Callum, who live in Perth, Australia.
He has written a book on his time in the cult, Life Behind the Wire, and runs the organisation, Rescue The Family, to raise awareness on cult manipulation.
In 2019, Anne passed away while in a Melbourne care home at the age of 98 and Ben has reconnected with his biological mother.
“What Anne did was evil. She used the name of Christ to give herself validity. She used a belief system,” Ben said.
“Justice was not done.”
