From Canine to K-9
With the pit bull breed spending three times longer in shelters than any other dog, it’s become a phenomenon to give these dogs a newfound purpose as a police K-9 for small budget cities that can appreciate the scrappy dog’s work.
Leaving through the back door of the City of Poughkeepsie Police Department (CPPD) in Upstate New York, Officer Justin Bruzgal guides his K-9 partner Kiah to the side door of his specially designed police car with a dog crate in place of a back seat. The mousey brown and cream colored pit bull jumps into the crate while Bruzgal fishes out from his trunk a locked, hard-walled black briefcase filled with a collection of the most popular street drugs: powder cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, heroin, black tar heroin, methamphetamine, and ecstasy. He leaves Kiah inside the car as he enters the fluorescently lit hallway that looks exactly how a police department should: sterile and uninviting.
The officer slams the briefcase atop a table in the hallway and rubs the back of his clean-shaven neck and buzzed head. “In here we’ve got every drug we’ve trained Kiah to know,” Bruzgal explains. He opens the case and grabs a mason jar filled with bags of crack cocaine inside the briefcase. He twists open the jar, sliding a sample bag of crack into the palm of his meaty hand. Bruzgal transfers the drug into a tightly-woven pouch secured by Velcro and walks with heavy, slow steps through the hallway, inspecting every crevice perfect for hiding. He opens the door of the copy machine planted in the corner and tosses the bag inside. Bruzgal retrieves his partner, bringing her inside the station and explains how the training exercise will go. He unleashes the eager dog from her leather restraint. Kiah immediately pounces like a relentless pinball, darting from wall to wall, desperately racking up points. She grinds her paws into the tile flooring as she hunts for the strategically hidden bag of crack. Her pinkish nose runs across the wall adjacent the machine, swiftly and accurately, encompassing every inch of the hall. Bruzgal stands quietly gripping his dog-less leash, watching his partner surge with love for the hunt.
Kiah stands among 29 other pit bulls currently across the country who have been rescued from shelters and trained for free to work as police K-9s through the non-profit Universal K9. Police departments typically purchase German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois for their K-9 units and rarely stray from those breeds. Their fearlessness and hard-working nature earns them the respect a K-9 needs to be taken seriously on the job. But recently, programs like Animal Farm Foundation and Universal K9 have been fighting to earn pit bulls the same respect by training them to be K-9s specializing in narcotics and tracking. Pit bulls characteristically are high-drive and hardworking, making them an excellent breed for police work even if they’re not universally accepted as pets.
The fighting dog perception that looms over pit bulls prevents the breed from being considered desirable companions. Michael Vick, former NFL quarterback sentenced for dog fighting, trained mostly pit bulls, further enhancing the aggressive pit bull stereotype in his high-profile trial and conviction. Debates sprung whether his pit bulls could be re-trained into being friendly, non-aggressive animals as they were assumed to be from birth. All but two could, according to the Best Friends Animal Society.
Labeling a dog as a pit bull today can still prevent him from being adopted. According to the Washington Post, on average, the breed spends three times longer in a shelter than similar looking dogs. Shelters loosely label dogs as pit bulls when a mutt has a few key characteristics such as a barrel chest, block head, large jaw, short fur, and a stacked build, says Stefanie Higgins, owner of the Cuse Pit Crew, a rescue organization for pit bulls. In 2014, Esquire reported that 2,000 to 3,000 pit bulls are euthanized each day, by far the breed with the highest rate of euthanasia, presumably because of their stereotype.
Through these programs, pit bulls are trained exactly the same as traditional police K-9s, they just have a more unique background. “It does not take a German Shepherd or a Belgian Mal to do this work, it can be any dog that has the will and drive to do it,” says Universal K9 owner Brad Croft.
The reasons for police departments taking on pit bulls instead of the customary K-9 breeds is threefold. One, shelters across the country mostly house pit bulls because people fear the breed, so by putting them into the limelight, communities will see that attitude comes moreso from the training of the dog rather than the dog itself. Two, small areas without a big city budget, especially those with drug abuse problems, need K-9s in police departments, but specially bred K-9s from overseas can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000, a cost many departments cannot afford. Because shelters don’t charge for the adoption of pit bulls, they provide departments a cost-effective alternative. Three, their past as a rescue dog makes them more willing to work under any condition and able to distinguish when they’re on the job versus off. The CPPD is in the vanguard working with pit bulls, and so far, it’s been successful. The stigma, though, still exists. “You must admit that any agency that’s picking up a pit bull breed is doing so with a little bit of a risk,” says Dr. Lou Ferland, executive director of the United States Police Canine Association, the toughest and most prestigious certification for K-9s across the country. “So will pit bulls in departments become popular? I don’t know. I’ve never had one try to meet our standards, but I guess we’ll see.”
Bruzgal inches closer to the copier, sensing Kiah will find the narcotics soon. Kiah’s head whips back as she glides past the machine, getting a whiff of what she’s trained to know. She spins, trotting back to exactly where the drugs are located. Kiah silently sits in a half plank position and presses her box-shaped muzzle against the plastic casing. Her tail smacks Bruzgal’s ankles as he comes to retrieve what she proudly found. It took forty-seconds, an extraordinary time that outshines the minutes it can take other pristinely bred K-9s. For her good work, Kiah gets her toy.
About two years ago, Kirby Animal Care Services in San Antonio, Texas called up Croft because they found a dog he’d be interested in training. The shelter discovered Kiah bleeding behind a convenient store in Kirby, a suburb of San Antonio, with her head split open from a hammer an anonymous man whacked her with. She had other signs of abuse, but no one came forward as her attacker or owner. The shelter nursed her back to health, eventually regaining each characteristic Croft says that makes a great K-9. “I don’t know how she survived, but whatever the case, she’s one hell of a dog,” says Croft. A permanent bump still rests on the top of Kiah’s head from the attack as a marker of where she came from.
Before taking Kiah, CPPD Police Chief Thomas Pape considered adding another K-9 to the two German Shepherds already in the department; however, the CPPD couldn’t afford the couple thousand-dollar cost until Animal Farm Foundation, an activist agency for pit bull adoption, approached Pape with a plan to cover the entire expense. “When they first approached me,” said Pape, “I said ‘gee, I’d really like to, but we can’t. We don’t have the money,’ and Animal Farm said, ‘no, you don’t understand. We’ll pay for it.’”
But it wasn’t just the cost of the dog that concerned Pape. After the pricy, initial dog fee comes the cost of altering a police vehicle with a crate for the dog, training the handler, maintaining the dog with food and vet visits, paying the handler with a stipend, and more. Many departments across the country cannot handle the consistent costs that come with having a K-9, even if the department desperately needs one.
In Clay County, North Carolina, the police department urgently needed a narcotics and tracking K-9 to upkeep with the rising drug abuse issues with methamphetamine, marijuana, and pills. The department just could never afford to own one, so taking an all-expense paid rescue pit bull from Universal K9 seemed like a simple solution. In March 2017, Corporal Chris Harper and Investigator Heath Woodard partnered up with K-9s Phantom and Sarah after passing a sixteen-week training course in Midlothian, Texas with Midlothian’s K-9 Handler Corporal Wes Keeling and Croft.
After just one month on the job, Woodard has deployed Phantom seven times, where she’s had six alerts and found narcotics five of those times. The first-time Woodard deployed Phantom he had been called over to Hayesville, a rural area twelve miles from the station, by two patrol officers who stopped a car with fictitious plates. The three men within the car refused a search, leading the officers to take precaution and use Phantom. Immediately, Phantom alerted on the driver’s door, where Woodard found a container with meth residue and a meth pot. All three suspects were arrested, and Phantom got a toy. “For a handler, that actually makes us extremely proud of the dog because they’re smelling a very small amount that’s left in a meth pot or marijuana pot, instead of smelling four or five pounds of the drug,” says Woodard.
The dogs work better than many departments would have thought, especially because they come free. “I was like man this is a free program, what’re we getting for free?” recalls Keeling, who has been a K-9 handler for 6 years. “There’s a lot of pressure on us as police officers to ensure that the product we get is going to do the job and do it well, so with that being said, I was apprehensive, but within two or three days, I worked the dog, and I was like oh man, I’m in.”
Keeling got his pit bull Remi after his $14,500 German Shepherd developed Pannus, a common German Shepherd eye disease that eventually blinds the dog. “I don’t know that we would’ve spent that kind of money on the next dog at the time,” says Keeling. “So when I found Universal K9, it was obviously very cost efficient and Remi was every bit as great as she was advertised.”
Having worked with a German Shepherd, Remi, who retired in the beginning of the 2015, and now a Belgian Malinois, Keeling knows there’s no difference between quality of work of the breeds, but there’s a difference in charisma, especially because the pit bulls are rescue dogs. “I would say at times the more traditional dogs have more setbacks than a pit bull because a pit bull or a shelter dog has been there done that. All you have to do is teach them the behavior,” says Keeling about his traditional K-9s having environmental issues with high grass and slick floors.
Keeling even keeps his Belgian Malinois away from his wife and kids for fear the dog won’t understand they’re family. “It’s not that the dog is a bad dog, there are no bad dogs, but all these dogs know is work,” says Keeling. “They don’t understand that sometimes they’re not working. They don’t know how to be dogs.”
Growing up in a shelter, where they’ve lived a full life beforehand as just a dog, the pit bulls Universal K9 rescues can distinguish between being on the job and off, whereas the traditional K-9s don’t understand they’re not always working. From six-weeks-old, these dogs live and breathe police work, which adjusts them to a long and successful career, yet removes them from the typical “dog life.” “I’ve got to tell you, I’m more intimidated by our Shepherds then I ever am of Kiah,” explains Pape. Pit bulls are not trained in bite work, so although suspects think the pit bull is more likely to attack them, the dog’s first instinct post-training would not be to bite. They’re passively trained to avoid any negative press contributing to the aggressive pit bull stereotype.
“For the bad guys, I’m okay if they think she’s going to bite, but I would have to literally throw a tennis ball at them to get her to run in their direction,” explains Deputy Jesse Bullinger. “When she got there she’s just going to lick their face, grab the tennis ball, and run back to me, just so ferocious.”
The stereotype of the pit bull sometimes bodes well for officers deploying the dogs, but oftentimes suspects refuse to believe a scrappy shelter dog with a socially bad rap can be trained just as well as a traditional Shepherd or Mal.
During one of his nightly patrol shifts just after 9 P.M., Bullinger pulls out of a feeder road with full speed on the Southbound 59 in Montgomery County, Texas. He turns on his lights with blaring sirens to alert a man and woman speeding that he was coming. The couple pulls over in seconds. Bullinger approaches the driver and asks permission to search, but he refuses. Instead of letting them off with a ticket, he deploys his pit bull Libby onto the car just for safe measures. Libby immediately approaches the passenger side, laying down, pressing her muzzle against the door. The couple steps out of the vehicle and Bullinger grabs a bag of Dubble Bubble bubble gum resting underneath the seat. The couple worriedly claims that it was just a bag of candy. “Pretty sure my dog is not trained on candy,” said Bullinger. Inside the bag was methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia mixed in with a handful of wrapped gum. Bulligner put the couple into custody and took them back to the station.
The challenge is changing the minds of the public that pit bulls can do this work. The CPPD, specifically, receives comments weekly feeding into the stereotypes of pit bulls. One anonymous source recently vented to Pape about the danger of Kiah’s public relation role, where she demonstrates training techniques at elementary schools. “I was very disturbed to read about the K-9 pit bull visiting schools. You are sending a very dangerous and reckless message to children and their families that pit bulls make safe family pets.”
Over time, though, through seeing how well the pit bull works, communities tend to become more accepting and understanding that there are no bad dogs, only bad owners. “I receive more positivity than negativity about Kiah,” says Officer Bruzgal. “She’s more beloved than hated nowadays.”
With the public slowly climbing on board, it’s up to police departments across the country to feel the same compassion for these shelter dogs with a newfound purpose. “Look at the program, look at these dogs, and do a real comparison of a $20,000 dog against a shelter pit bull,” says Keeling. “Just because you’ve done something one way for 20 years, does not mean that’s how it has to be done. Give these dogs a chance. We’re giving them a purpose, so take that risk.”
Croft has three more trained pit bulls waiting for more departments to take that chance. Soon, they’ll be living their brand-new life.
Myth or Fact?
In order to see pit bulls as the friendly dogs they are, it’s important to know what’s true and what’s not true about the breed by hearing the myths versus the facts.
People peg pit bulls with all different stereotypes that overall are not true. According to Stefanie Higgins, owner of the Cuse Pit Crew, which advocates for the pit bull breed in attempt to deflate the inaccurate pit bull labels, most myths that people associate with pit bulls are untrue, and she wants to set the public straight.
Myth: Pit bulls can’t be family pets
Fact: Pit bulls can actually live successfully with families, becoming beloved household pets. They’re incredibly high energy, so they do require a great deal of attention from the owner, which can be a turnoff for many, but in no way a harmful aspect. The pit bull will protect and love his owners if treated right.
Myth: Pit bulls have a locking jaw
Fact: If a pit bull had a locking jaw, he would not be within the dog species. No dogs have a locking jaw.
Myth: Pit bulls are naturally aggressive, fighting dogs
Fact: Pit bulls in the 1920s and 1930s were forced to fight for money, just as the Michael Vick dogs were, because they are strong and athletic, not because they are inherently aggressive. The breeder didn’t want the pit bull, though, to turn on people, so pit bulls were bred to be people friendly, and over time, pit bulls have been bred and trained to be docile with other dogs and animals, making them great pets.
