Bailing up more than one pig at a time is something that all pig hunters would love to do but there are a few things that have to be right for this to happen. The main thing is the dogs have to be willing to stand back and bail because as soon as any dog goes in and grabs a pig and that pig starts to squeal all of the rest of the pigs will break away leaving you with only the one pig. These pigs that I have bailed up are my own pigs and are nine months old and weigh between 50 – 60 pounds each. I filmed these pigs when they were only a couple of days old and have been interacting with them ever since. All of my pig dogs know not to chase them as they are still just a little bit small yet. These pigs escape from the training block every day and head up the hill to eat the bracken roots. The main pig block used to have a lot of bracken in it but over the year has been completely cleaned out so these young pigs have used their initiative and ducked under the electric wire to get an extra feed. I have enjoyed watching them from above whenever I go to the top of the hill. My dogs would sit beside me and just watch the pigs with me. Up until now I have not let the dogs chase these pigs because I looked at them as being too small and I hate seeing dogs chasing small pigs it is just a bad habit that I lot of hunters don’t understand how to train their dogs not to grab small pigs and this lack of training loses a lot of good pigs while a dog is wasting time chasing small pigs the big ones are getting away.
On this particular day I was sitting up the hill with my four dogs Fog, Lightning, Jeff and Snow watching the pigs digging away in the bracken when I decided to send Jeff and Snow down to bail them up. I first told Fog and Lightning to stay then sent the other two dogs away. As you can see by the footage these two dogs had done well and after fifteen minutes Snow returned to me so I sent Fog over with Jeff and they carried on bailing for quite some time before the pigs managed to get into the pine trees on the other side of the gully so at this stage I called both dogs back. This was to be the first time that I have let Fog bark at these pigs so it will be interesting to see whether he thinks that he is allowed to bark at them again in the near future.
