[QUOTE]Upon hearing this, he replied with what I considered to be insane...stating muzzles could be designed with "spears" and such. This was one reason why I eventually cut all ties to the guy. That idea just seemed wacked and sick to me.[/QUOTE] lol. You might be surprised to know this has actually been a thing in real life before. In fact a very significant chapter in "bandog" history. The final chapter of the original "book". In the 1800s/early 1900s the role of the gameskeeper's night dog was heavily under fire, and their use was starting to fall out of favour with landowners and the law, as being maimed by a dog started to seem like a pretty heavy price to pay for poaching a rabbit or two. The whole idea of the "king's forrest" with his precious animals the peasants shan't dare touch seemed a bit outdated and yet gameskeepers were still setting exceedingly formidable dogs onto poachers and letting them savage them. Pressure to do away with the use of night dogs started to build and in their death throws the gameskeepers came up with some pretty crazy ideas to try and cling onto their tradition. One such idea was indeed muzzling the dogs with steel muzzles, and training them to use the muzzles as weapons- running in and hitting the man with their muzzled muzzle to knock him down. This is also where the fairy tale of bullmastiffs having the instinct to merely sit on bad guys and not bite them arose, it's not true at all but gameskeepers were spreading all sorts of crap to try and get the public on side with the continuation of the gameskeeper's night dog. It didn't work and the role was largely abolished, just in time for the last night dogs to parent the purebred show dog strain we know today as the bullmastiff. But before it was abolished, for a couple of decades at least, the "conscientious" and "responsible" gameskeepers were doing things the "correct" way and setting only muzzled dogs onto perpetrators.