Going to the Dogs: Cutting Edge

In this Cutting Edge film multi-award winning filmmaker Penny Woolcock is reunited with former gang member Dylan Duffus (1 Day, One Mile Away) to explore the criminal subculture of the dog fighting world. In this authored film she examines our conflicted relationship not just with dogs, but the way we treat all animals as commodities.

Demonised by the media, certain breeds of dog are seen as ‘status symbols’, and some are also trained to fight. Dog fighting, illegal since 1835, has in recent years been identified by the police and RSPCA as a growing problem in inner-city areas across the UK.

In this challenging film, Penny engages directly with those involved in dog fighting. Their identities concealed for the cameras, the men talk frankly about their dogs, how they train them for fights and how they deal with injured and dying animals.

Banned breeds are popular and can be developed for ferocity and strength. Some of these dogs have been responsible for attacks on children and adults but the pit bull was seen as a family dog and a heroic symbol of the frontier spirit before it became demonised as a ghetto dog. The Dangerous Dogs Act, meanwhile, has been criticised as a toothless piece of legislation that punishes the dogs rather than owners who don’t know how to train them or encourage them to fight.

Through her work on previous films, Penny gained the trust of current and former gang members in Birmingham. In this new authored documentary, she has gained unprecedented access to the men who train their dogs to fight, often at night and in empty tower blocks or warehouses to evade arrest.

Penny’s footage reveals in detail what is involved in this hidden world and the brutal reality for the dogs from their strict and unremitting secret training regimes, through to the bloody fights. She films with people engaged in the popular pastime of pheasant shooting and speaks to academics about that and other sports, such as horse racing, which avoid the kind of hostility that dog fighting attracts.  The documentary also looks at the inherent brutality that is common place in the breeding and slaughter of animals in the food industry.