Otis Orchards-based dog trainer and German shepherd breeder Nick Lungu has been called a "puppy whisperer" by some of his clients for the obedience work he has done with their pets.

Lungu and his wife, Jacqueline Lungu, own I-Guard International K-9 Services LLC, a 10-year-old business specializing in the breeding and training of German shepherds as well as the training of any breed of dog for any service need or behavioral issue.

Lungu says he's trained police-unit dogs, medical-alert dogs, and service dogs for people with disabilities, as well as the average family companion.

An initial evaluation of a dog's behavior typically costs about $75, and during that session Lungu determines its training needs. The cost of basic obedience training varies depending on the dog, but could range between $300 and $500 for a three- to four-week training package, says Jacqueline Lungu. For that package, a dog likely would attend two to three hour-long sessions per week, she says. Owners could opt to drop their dog off with Nick for those sessions, or have it boarded and trained at the Lungu's home for a higher daily fee.

Nick Lungu, a lifelong dog lover, says he's wanted to work with canines as a full-time occupation since he received his first German shepherd at the age of 10, when he lived in Ukraine. He and his grandfather trained the dog to herd sheep on his family's farm, he says.

When Lungu and his parents fled the country a couple of years after that in the early 90s due to the religious persecution happening there, they relocated to Portland, Ore. There, Lungu says he continued to work with dogs, helping out at a dog-training facility in Troutdale, just east of Portland.

"I had to clean kennels and do the grunt work before I could train," Lungu says. "I got involved there and had a passion for the canine and an interest in their abilities. Since then, I have been hands on."

Now, Lungu's childhood dreams are a reality, and he runs I-Guard at his home's 5-acre property in Otis Orchards, having moved there with his family about a year ago from Pullman. Lungu says he employs two part-time trainers who assist him.

While Lungu both trains and breeds German shepherds, he says the majority of the business's focus is on the training of any type of dog.

"We chose German shepherds because they are a complete, balanced dog and can do a versatile job as a pet, service dog, or guard, and they're great with kids," he says.

He adds that his wife and their three children—ages 11, 10, and 5—spend a great deal of time socializing the German shepherd puppies they raise until the dogs are sold and can begin their obedience training.

Partly because of that, as well as their training, Lungu says all of the German shepherds he and his family raises are tolerant of children. He adds, though, that the dogs instantly can go into full protection mode if commanded by their owner or handler, or if provoked by a threat.

"When you learn to communicate with them, you can ask anything of them," Lungu says. "The key with training is consistency. As long as you are consistent and you have a rewards system and can reward them for providing the correct reaction, you can teach them to do anything on command."

Lungu says currently he's training a client's dog—Snowberry, a teacup Chihuahua—on how to become a medical-alert dog that could recognize a medical problem with her handler that wouldn't be recognizable to a human.

Medical-alert dogs can be trained to recognize when a person is about to experience a seizure, has low blood sugar, and a number of other chronic or physically unnoticeable conditions, he says.

Lungu says a majority of I-Guard's clients are people seeking obedience training for their family dogs, although he adds that a trend he's recently noticed is people seeking dogs trained to provide physical protection.

"People will spend a lot of money on personal protection," he asserts. "In the last five years, it's boomed, and people are looking to canine security now."

Lungu cites a New York Times article published in early June of this year telling the story of a German shepherd trained for personal protection that sold for $230,000 to a wealthy company executive.

He adds that he's sold his own trained protection dogs for as much as $40,000 to similar clientele.

A dog that's able to protect at that level but that still fills the role of a family companion animal can take up to two years to fully train, Lungu says.

"You have to consider them as a bodyguard 24 hours a day," he says. "The industry is expanding and exploding, and as the economic situation goes downhill, people are looking into canine security."

When training a personal-protection dog, Lungu says he doesn't teach the animal to be vicious and unwelcoming to all strangers, but to recognize certain behaviors or signs in humans that could lead to a threat to their handler. Then the dog knows to alert its handler and will bark at the threat to warn it, he says.

"We teach (the dogs) to be clear in the head and to think before they react," he says. "We teach them to use their brain; it's endless hours of training."

Lungu says for his training sessions he usually takes clients' dogs or his own German shepherds to a public setting such as a park so that the animal is exposed to normal, everyday events and stimuli during their training. He says that exposure is crucial to the dogs' training success so they know how to appropriately react to—or not react to—other dogs, animals, and strangers in any public setting.

For example, Lungu's three-year-old, 90-pound male German shepherd, Uno, is trained to respond in what's called a bark and hold if a threat should arise to whomever is handling him.

"He knows the difference between normal and inappropriate behavior" in other people, Lungu says. "He would bare his teeth and let the person know they can't continue or he will have to stop them."

Aside from obeying commands and alerting his handler on his own, Lungu says Uno also knows how to "alert" on command.

Lungu demonstrated this by whispering a command to Uno while he slept on the grass at Mirabeau Meadows Park, in Spokane Valley, and the dog immediately awoke to look for a sign of danger, even though no threat was present.

Lungu says he continually educates himself on how to train dogs by working with other dog trainers, reading, and going to seminars.

"It's a challenge to me, and I want to learn if there is something that hasn't been done," he says. "They are such intelligent creatures."

He adds that he also constantly reinforces the responses he's trained his dogs to give.

A person interested in purchasing a German shepherd puppy from the Lungus could expect to pay around $1,500, he says.

The puppies typically are ready to be sold when they're around eight weeks old, and a majority of people who purchase an I-Guard German shepherd return for obedience training when the puppy is between four and six months old and ready to begin learning basic commands.

Lungu says for such clients he usually personally picks out a dog from one of his litters, based on the client's needs and the dog's personality.

He says he also requires an in-person inspection of potential clients' homes if they express interest in buying one of I-Guard's German shepherd puppies.

"We almost talk you out of a dog before we'll sell one," Lungu jokes. "We'd rather not place a dog in the wrong home. We raise it and it's a quality animal, and we don't produce a lot of dogs. We have three litters a year and we're very picky about where we place them."

Most of the Lungu's breeding stock comes from German descent, meaning that the dogs' parents or grandparents were bred in Germany, he says. He adds that he keeps in contact with several German shepherd breeders there, and that he buys his dogs from them because the breed's standards in Germany are much stricter than in the U.S.

He says that the American Kennel Club doesn't require that purebred German shepherds be certified for their elbow and hip ratios, as the breed standards in Germany call for.

"To us, that is a big deal and that means we are getting the cream of the crop and we can track that down for generations and know their hip and elbow rating," he says.

To align with his dogs' heritage, Lungu's German shepherds are trained to respond to commands in both English and German, he says.

Of the seven dogs that the Lungu family currently owns, only two live with the family: Uno and Tai, a female. I-Guard has six females in its breeding program, including Tai, although Lungu says the other female dogs are fostered out and co-owned by people living in the Inland Northwest.

"We want to make sure no one is sitting in a kennel," he says. "That is my biggest thing. I don't breed to make money; it's more of an expensive hobby, and I breed to provide a solid, stable German shepherd."

He adds that usually no more than three German shepherds live with his family, not including young puppies that haven't been weaned from their mother. Lungu says he provides all of the food, veterinary care, and training for the dogs he owns that don't live at his home.

"That is the right way of doing it," Lungu says. "The dogs are part of someone's life, and they aren't sitting in a kennel."

Once a year, Lungu says he enters several of his dogs in a national German shepherd competition, called the USA Sieger Show. This year's event took place in Dallas in late April, and Lungu says of the six I-Guard dogs entered into the competition, four of them took home trophies.

Judges rate the dogs in various categories such as conformation, workability, obedience, protection, focus, and loyalty to their handlers, Lungu says. Conformation refers to the correctness of the dog's body structure according to breed standards, including its bones and hip and elbow ratios.

He says this year Uno earned an award for his work in protection and obedience. Two I-Guard puppies also won awards, including Basko, a male, who won first place in the four-to six-month-old puppy class, Lungu says.

"This year was our best year, and we had the most dogs entered," he says.