If you've ever served in any Special Operations Unit one of the core principles is to leave it better than your found it. This is something that requires utter honesty with yourself and your teammates, and it is not an environment for the timid of heart or delicate of constitution. At SOK9 we value experience and innovation working in tandem. But sadly in this niche industry it is very common for the former to actively work to prevent the latter simply because of economics and stubborn adherence to abusive old-school methods. We have encountered tremendous opposition from long standing industry leaders, whose old-school philosophies seem cemented primarily because they cannot afford to publicly endorse a better system without simultaneously destroying their hard-earned reputations and thus their livelihood. But make no mistake. This is an industry whose currency is both human and canine lives and therefore not an industry that can afford simple profit motivated businesses willing to justify any wrong in order to save a buck. We do not do business with any company who's profit motivated model advocates against the use of vaccinations, or uses abusive training methods as overhead reducing measures. Unlike so many we do train an 'out' to all of our bite dogs because a dog that won't release a bite on command is simply an out of control liability, not an asset. KNPV has a legacy of abuse that has unfortunately been imported to the US by the hardcore dog sport crowd. Methods such as the use of cattle prods, sharpened pinch collars, shovel beatings, e-collars set to ridiculously high settings sometimes fashioned around the male dog's testicles, and food deprivation to highlight just a few, all in the name of a higher obedience score is insane. In plain knuckle-dragging-English at SOK9 we don't give a FUCK if it takes our dogs a few fractions of a second longer to execute an obedience command as long as we know we have control over our canine. It is our opinion that KNPV may have been the start of something, but it is no longer the best provider of high drive working K9 training methods or dogs. KNPV failed to evolve in the right direction with their focus straying to dog sport rather than true Police / Military / Personal Protection K9. Again in our opinion the best K9 prospects are being produced by small but passionate boutique breeders right here in the USA.