For Jason Purgason, few dogs are bad dogs. They just haven’t been well trained.

Purgason, a certified K-9 and SWAT instructor who was the first law enforcement dog handler in Rockingham County, says most every dog can be a friend and companion, while special breeds can perform specialized jobs for law enforcement.

So why are some dogs considered anti-social, suffering what he calls “a socialization deficit?”

Most often, he thinks the problem is more with the human in the dog’s life.

“The hardest part of this whole job is training people,” Purgason said Thursday during a training session with Lucy, a Great Dane, and her Statesville human, Sandy Murdock.

Murdock found Lucy as a stray over three months ago, and wanted to save her.

“She was a stray, she was not spayed. I think she was afraid of everything,” Murdock said.

The result? A dog that first tries to scare humans away as a result of her own fear.

“Fear-aggressive dogs don’t want to bite,” Purgason said.

“They want you to back off” so they growl and bark and it usually works.

“That conditions them, so they keep doing that,” he said.

“People in America look at dogs as humans in fur coats,” he said. “But they’re not. They have their own behaviors, and we try to make them fit ours. So maybe they have issues of dominance,” he said, and the dog’s way to address it is to tell the human “back off.”

The problem isn’t just with large dogs, he said. “We deal with behavioral issues in everything from Chihuahuas to Great Danes,” he said, displaying fear aggression.

With Lucy, Purgason initiated a course of direction that makes the dog pay attention to Murdock rather than reacting to everything else, which could be distractions like other humans or other dogs.

“This is wonderful,” Murdock said as she put Lucy through her paces, which involved reinforced training on sitting, staying and coming.

Serious work

But pampering pet owners is not Purgason’s main goal. As a certified police canine trainer through the U.S. Police Canine Association, the International Police Working Dog Association and Eastern States Working Dog Association, he strives to provide law enforcement with working dogs with well-rounded police skills.

“I’ve trained dogs for (law enforcement) in Wilkes County, Salisbury, Alexander County, the Federal Reserve Bank in Jacksonville, Fla., and the Miami Police Department,” he said.

He chooses certain breeds for police work, and can provide turn-key canine officers for police patrol duty, search and rescue, human remain detection and personal protection. Those that do patrol duties are trained in handler protection, narcotic and explosive detection, building searches, human tracking, evidence searching, and, well, “to catch the bad guys,” Purgason said.

And he and his team of trainers say it’s a joy to work with the dogs. “It’s not a job because we have so much fun,” he said with a laugh.

Their last chance

Perhaps Purgason’s most critical mission is his pro bono work with aggressive dogs in local shelters. Most angry dogs that come to the shelter never have a chance for adoption because of their attitude.

“We understand that a majority of animals that are in shelters and rescues are often likely not to be adopted,” he said.

His solution is the Second Chance Program. What that means is he takes an aggressive dog from an animal shelter and puts it through an intensive program of training and behavior modification at no charge to make it more adoptable.

He will train the dog for three to six weeks, and then help find a family to care for the dog. “Once a family is selected, we take the time to work with them and their new dog to make sure that they understand their training, how to handle them effectively, how to reward them and correct any mistakes properly,” he said. “We also assist them in integrating the dog into their new home and offer free follow-up lessons to ensure that their new dog maintains their training.”

And he wants to take on the hard cases. “We are up for the challenge to take on the most difficult dogs,” he said.

“There are dogs we can’t fix,” he admitted. “But not many; none that I have seen.”

Which to Purgason means one fewer dog euthanized, and one more loving family companion.