Lets face it when we go out pig hunting we want to catch good pigs not have our dogs out there mauling small pigs. For every small pig that your dogs kill is one less that you can catch next year and there is very little eating on a piglet. When training a young dog do not praise it up for catching small pigs or it will keep on catching those small pigs and soon the area that you hunt will have very few pigs left that your dogs are going to catch. The other bad thing about letting your dogs catch small pigs is that the dogs will want to go in and hold and to me a person who sees how animal thinks and acts by teaching a dog to act aggressively is teaching it a bad habit. I realize that it is hard for the average hunter to get their dogs onto enough pigs to give them the right training but if you do not persevere and get the training right then you are not going to get as good a results from your dogs.
My young dog Fog is now ten months old and when he is in the training block he works around the small pig that is in there at present and I would not want him to ever think that he was allowed to attack any pig. So by putting a dog against bigger pigs all the time they become more confident and learn that you want them to catch the bigger pigs. On the 17/10/2012 I went out for a hunt with my older dog Cloud and my young dog Fog. When I parked the motorbike up I had only walked fifty meters when I saw Cloud and Fog take off at full speed down
the hill and into the Douglas firs. At eight hundred meters down in the gully I heard a couple of barks as the boar broke around into the next gully where the two dogs opened with a good bail. As I closed in I could see Fog and Cloud bailing a very good boar. Before I took my shot I took a photo of the boar in the bracken and matagouri. While the photo did not come out as well as I would have liked I can still make out the boar. Once I had shoot him the hard work for me
was about to start as I had to carry him about one km up hill. The hill was getting that step that I could only make fifty meters at a time. The thing that was going through my mind at this time is how do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time. So as long as I was getting one more step I was getting closer to getting out. At one stage I had about fifty meters more up hill to go to get to a track when I noticed my wife Janice turn up to the hut about one and a half km’s away. At this point I was
absolutely buggered so I decided to leave the boar where he was and head back to the bike and back to the hut just in case Janice decide to leave again as I had not seen her for a couple of days. Back at the hut I had a well deserved drink and food, then Janice and I headed back up the hill to retrieve the boar. Janice has only ever been out on the hill with me once before eighteen years ago and while I did catch pigs that day she was not keen to come out again. So it was good to have her out with me on the hill once again. Janice managed to get a reasonable photo of me carrying the boar out with my hut away in the back ground and I even managed to convince her to drag the boar down the hill for me. Back at the hut he weighed up at 153 pounds which makes him the second boar to come out of this gully this year weighing exactly the same weight. The dogs are going to be well feed over the next few days as this boar is destined for dog food.
hi bill how can we getin contact soon re dogs, im keen to do the 24 hr training phil 027 220 5830