The majority of pig hunters would rather catch a nice boar rather than a sow. The reason for this is that we understand the importance of keeping our hunting areas stocked up with wild game. By killing sows we are also killing our own sport. When a sow breeds in the wild they normally have between 5 – 7 piglets in a litter so for every sow that we kill we are also killing off the potential pigs that she could have. On the other hand a boar can mate with many sows so it only takes one boar in an area to breed with a lot of sows. Another thing that deters hunters from targeting sows is that they can not put up as much of a fight compared to a boar as they do not have tusks to defend themselves. Every now and then we hear of hunters saying that they have a dog that targets the boars. These dogs would be the envy of a lot of hunters. What a lot of hunters don’t understand is how to train their dog to just target those boars.
I hope to answer this question here.
What I see a lot of hunters do is first not have the proper control over their dogs so that when they get onto a pig the dogs do not listen to their owners. This is the first problem the second issue is that a lot of hunters just don’t think about releasing the sows. What this does is teaches your dogs to catch everything. If you have your dogs under good command so that they listen to you when they are on a pig and they are only bailing rather than holding the pig then all the hunter needs to do is call their dog off any sow that they catch. Dogs are cleaver animals and they soon work out what animal that you are after. This is not to say that if you are out hunting and the only animal around is a sow that your dogs will not bail it up. When I put my dogs into the training block they know that they are not allowed to touch a sow our a young pig. By doing this regularly the dogs start to understand what it is that you want. At present I have a sow in the block that was born in their and she has had a litter of seven piglets, one of those piglets had died at a time when their were no dogs in the block but the other six piglets are doing well and are in the block while any dog training is going on. When these piglets were just born Fog tracked over to them and gave two barks as I closed in on him he was standing back watching the sow and piglets and waiting for me, no harm done. Whenever I am training in the block and the sow is with another pig the dogs will always target the boar so that if the pigs split up I now that they will always leave the sow alone and catch the boar. I also have a wild sow in the block that I had caught and kept in my cattle yards for two months before she escaped and found her own way into the pig block. This sow is heavily pregnant and looking like she is due to drop a litter in the next couple of weeks. Since the wild sow has been in the block not one of the dogs have bailed her up.
In this attached piece of footage I had three dogs in the block a while back when Breeze was still alive. What happens is Lightning and a training dog tracked across to the opposite face where there is a sow and a boar in the scrub. When Lightning sees the sow break out he steps back as soon as he realises that it is actually the sow while the training dog takes of after her. The sow only moves fifty meters up the hill and when she stops the training dog steps back as if not sure what to do and is wondering why Lightning is not following. While this is happening Breeze has tracked across and puts the boar up just below where the sow had broken out of. The boar runs up the hill towards the sow. At this stage you can see how much slower Breeze is than the other training dog yet the training dog slows down because it is still not sure of what it is allowed to do, it is only Breeze barking behind them that keeps the training dog chasing but not stopping, with the dogs in behind the boar diverts off to the pine trees. As soon as Lightning heard the first bark he went out wide as if he knew which way the boar was going to run and tried to cut him off before he got into the pines but did not quite get there quick enough and the dogs bailed the boar in the pines.
The way that Lightning has gone wide on this pig is something that I have seen a number of times now that we have GPS’s. I believe that the dogs are clever enough to work out which way the boar is going to break and they get around in front of the animal which confuses the boar. Last week Fog went out wide to stop the 188 pound boar. If we were to put ourselves in this same situation and we had a dog tracking us knowing that it is going to attack us we would run like hell. Yet if all of a sudden a dog appeared in front of us we would have to think very fast as to what our next move is going to be so if that dog is cleaver enough to stand back and growl at us we only have two options to either try and run away from that dog risking running back into the other dog that is tracking us our stand our ground while we clear our thoughts. Checkmate
