The provincial government is working on ways to regulate how police dogs are trained.

That's according to Doug King, a lawyer for Pivot Legal Society, which has recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Maple Ridge man accidentally bitten by one of those dogs two years ago.

King says many police forces appear to use different training methods for police dogs, and the government wants to bring them under one umbrella.

"The Saanich and New Westminster departments for the last few years have deployed a different style of training and their numbers are significantly lower than other departments like the VPD and the RCMP.

“So if there are different methods of training and there's different style of deployment out there, and one seems to be more effective than the other, I think the province is right to step in and say, we owe it to the people of the province to look at this and find out what the best practices are here."

Pivot recently revealed statistics that suggest police dogs make up nearly half of all injuries caused by municipal police.