Bulldog or Cross?

Something that is becoming a real issue these days is the subject of cross bred bulldogs. We've known for a number of years that it goes on but in the last three or four months it's starting to become a real problem, to the point that where as before we were seeing maybe one in 25 dogs we were asked to rehome turn out to be a cross its probably now as many as 1 in 10. With the dog breeding laws as lax as they are its a problem I can only forsee becoming worse.
I think there are several reasons why it happens, apart from people jumping on the "bulldogs are unhealthy" bandwagon I think the main reason is simply money. Put a bulldog male to a staffy bitch and the result is a free whelped litter that look a little like a bulldog with no up front c-section or stud fee costs, a bitch that's much more likely to rear her own pups and a price tag of anything around the thousand pound mark. These dogs are now finding themselves homeless with owners who really think they have a bulldog. Ann Warwick at american bulldog rescue has helped us out with a few but she's also snowed under with problems far worse than ours and it is now starting to become a genuine issue and I'm not entirely sure what we, as breed enthusiasts can do about it. Some of these dogs are very difficult to tell and long gone are the days when all we had to go on was a leggy bulldog. A combination of long tail, button ears and lack of nose wrinkle is usually how we go about deciding but we can all think of at least one known purebred bulldog that has at least one of these features. Thankfully it is still fairly easy to spot a long bulldog tail against a full staffy tail but having said that we did have a dog with a very long tapered tail, who, if his kc papers were to be believed, was pure bulldog through and through.