Anton traveled up from Oamaru for a couple of hours training. This was to be Anton’s third trip in for training. Oddie is a seven year old dog that started as a family pet until Anton caught the pig hunting bug three years ago. Oddie had held all of the pigs that he had caught up until recently when he bailed one so Anton was hoping that we could get him to bail. His other dog Tiger is from Vaughan Currie a well known pig hunter from the top of the South Island. Tiger is only a young dog and has only seen a couple of smaller pigs so has not bailed yet. Because Oddie was described as a pretty hard dog we put him on a rope before entering the training block.
I was using Fog to do the finding as I wanted to get the white boar bailed as he would be the best boar for a hard dog. I had seen the white boar before I went up and let Fog out of the kennel but when I was ready to enter the block he had disappeared leaving only Digger standing at the fence. I managed to get Fog to work past Digger and track away where I had last seen the white boar. Fog done well to track down into the creek and put up a bail. Because Fog was in a rough piece of the gully that I don’t normally get into I let Oddie off the rope and we watched him on the GPS as he seemed to go twenty meters past Fog and the pig. As we closed in Oddie had come back behind us and did not want anything to do with this boar.
We managed to get Tiger to give a couple of barks over the next thirty minutes before the boar broke out. Fog was right on him with Tiger giving chase but Oddie did not seem to want to do to much. Each time we got to a bail Oddie and Tiger started getting a wee bit keener especially when the boar broke each time. We were at about the third bail when I noticed Oddie had a poke in his side. He must have got this when he first went up to the boar and that was why he was so stand offish. At one bail Digger came down to see what fun he was missing out on so we had two bails going together. By the time we brought the dogs out of the block after two hours they had gained a lot of confidence and were no comparison to the same dogs two hours earlier. This gives me great satisfaction seeing dogs improve so much in such a short time.