There’s nothing quite as shameful in British country circles as being the owner of an ill-trained hound that disrupts a day’s hunting or shooting.
So one imagines Princess Anne will be appropriately mortified after one of her English bull terriers allegedly attacked a gamekeeper’s dog during a Royal Family pheasant shoot.
According to a report in the Sun, the royal dog fight happened during the Boxing Day shoot on Christmas Day at Sandringham, when Anne’s dog “sank its teeth” into the ear of a dog belonging to a gamekeeper, resulting in “a lot of blood and screaming.”
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The Sun’s source said: “The Boxing Day shoot’s a huge family affair so Anne took along her dog. It ran across the field straight at the gamekeeper’s dog and latched on to its ear.”
Anne famously eschewed her mother’s preferred breed, corgis, in favor of bull terriers, which were originally bred for bull baiting and have a powerful bite. The princess, at the time of her first acquisition, declared: “This will give the palace corgis a run for their money.”
The latest episode appears to have been prolonged and traumatic. The source told the Sun: “It took a while to get the dog off the ear because it had really sunk its teeth in. Everyone was OK in the end but the atmosphere was extremely tense afterwards for some time.”
“A good few people questioned what if it had been Charlotte or George or any of the children instead of another dog?”
Anne has form when it comes to her dogs running wild: she was the first royal to be convicted in court (under the dangerous dogs act) when she admitted in 2001 that her bull terrier Dotty bit two children while off the leash in Windsor Great Park.
The older child, aged 12, was bitten on the collar bone and twice on the leg, while his 7-year-old brother was scratched on the arm and bitten on the leg. Both went to hospital but did not need stitches.
She was fined £500 and a judge warned the dog would be destroyed if it reoffended.
A year later another of Anne’s terriers, called Florence, attacked one of the Queen’s corgis at Christmas. The corgi had to be put down.
Norfolk Police and the RSPCA have received no reports or complaints about the latest alleged dog incident, the Sun reported.
