Currently, many people are raising pets such as dogs and cats. People care about their pets seriously and treat them as their true friends and families. However, concerns about how to protect people from ferocious pets when a serious accident happens started to rise in our society.
A few years ago, it was a big issue that a famous singer, Choi Si-won, did not make his dog wear a muzzle, which led this dog to attack a woman. Unfortunately, she died a few days later due to the attack. This dog was a French Bulldog, which is known as a small type, and people were shocked that this small dog had caused someone’s death. On January 18th, 2018, Korea made new regulations to prevent such accidents. However, there is an on-going debate about one of the regulations. There is a regulation that obligates people to wear muzzles on their dogs that are taller than 40 centimeters. As we can see that even though Choi Si-won’s dog was so small that nobody ever thought that this dog would make the woman die, some people think that this regulation is not effective enough to prevent people getting hurt from small dogs.
In my opinion, it is grateful that this regulation made at least large dogs wear muzzles. However, besides the law regulating owners’ behavior, ferocious pets owners should also aware possibilities of their dogs attacking people. They still say that “My dog does not bite people because it is so well-behaved.” Even though new regulations were enforced since July 25th, 2020, which seemed to prevent accidednts from dogs, one of the famous ferocious dog species, Rottweiler, attacked a Spitz, which had died from that attack. This tragedy happened since the Rottweiler’s owner did not wear a muzzle on his/her dog. Worst of all, the owner is refusing to put the dog out of its misery. A famous dog trainer, Kang Hyung-wook, once said on his SNS that Rottweiler is very sensitive to protect their owners, so if people want to raise this type seriously, they should educate this dog to socialize and wear muzzles. As you can see from the aforementioned incident of Rottweiler, it is not easy to raise these types of dogs in Korea. Therefore, it is essential for people who want to raise ferocious dogs to get an education about how to train their pets well and put muzzles on them. For example, in Switzerland, when people adopt dogs, it obligates people to complete a course on pet management. Especially, this country introduces a license about ferocious dogs.
In conclusion, I think there is an increase in the number of people raising dogs at home while some of them have insufficient awareness of caring people’s safety. Therefore, it is time to improve awareness and make harder punishments and regulations for owners who do not follow existing laws. Laws like obligating owners to wear muzzles on their dogs already exist, but we do not have enough laws that guarantee qualifications of owners such as the Switzerland’s pet license. I am not just saying about only one’s effort to prevent such serious accidents. People should cooperate one another to make the society be responsible to prevent accidents caused by carelessness.