Chris travelled down from Nelson where he works in the forestry. Both of Chris’s bitches are Lockley breed his older dog Kim is over four years old and Chris thinks that she may be targeting the smaller pigs when she is out hunting and she likes to hold them. His younger bitch Pip is twelve months old and needing more work on good pigs. For our first run we tried just Chris’s two dogs down in the small pig block with Mr Pig and Black and White. The two boars were resting up in their A frame shelter when we arrived with the dogs. We stood around for a few minutes but the dogs were not keen on doing any thing as they seemed to not be to sure of what they were allowed to do so I had to go up and get Lightning to help encourage the other two dogs to start barking. Once Lightning opened up the other two started to get the hang of things. This was a good run with the two bitches gaining a lot of confidence. Next we took the dogs for a run up the hill beside the motorbike to see the sheep. Both dogs performed well with no problems and we had a lot of sheep walking around us.
On our second run in the main block Fog tracked away and put up a bail on a number of pigs as we could hear them all talking to each other. When the other dogs arrived Kim singled out one of the small pigs and had it down in the scrub squealing. At the time she was wearing a muzzle so she could not do any real damage to the pig and I was quick to give her a shock on the collar which had her coming off quickly, no harm done. Fog ended up coming back to me which may have been because he heard the small pig squeal and he knows that the boss does not like hearing a pig squeal. From here we went for a walk up the gully hopping to give the dogs a chance to have a look around to see if they could find a pig. This time the tables were turned as it was the pig that found us. We were standing around having a yarn when we heard Digger coming down through the scrub towards us. The dogs had a good bail on Digger for a while before we called the dogs off and ended this run. While we were giving the dogs a break we went for a walk down to the waterfall which is right at my gate and a great attraction that is well known by a lot people. The weather was not overly warm so I could not convince Chris to jump off.
After tea the white boar had turned up so I put Fog in after him and the dogs had a good bail going down in the gully but we were quickly running out of day light so I called Fog back off to see if the other two bitches might stay down there with the boar on their own but it was not to be they did not stay to long after Fog had disappeared on them. For me to call any of my dogs off a pig I do not even have to say a word, all I do is push the button on the collar that makes a buzzing noise and that dog will stop doing what it is doing and return straight back to me and they will quite happily sit back with me and watch the other dogs carry on bailing, to me this is great control as I only need to give one command at any time and the dog will go straight back in and help out. This is one of the most important parts of training any dog is having a dog there that is under good command and knows what job you want the dog to do. A couple of times when Fog was sitting back with us and the other two came off the bail to come back to us I only needed to whistle Fog straight back to the boar to carry on bailing, this gets the other dogs to go back to the boar and learn to stay with the pig a bit longer.
Next morning we walked right around the main pig block with Fog, Kim and Pip and could not find a single pig. It had rained during the night which must have washed away all of the scent. So we resorted back to the small pig block and bailed Black and white. This was a good bail to finish on as Chris had to drive all the way back to Nelson so he did not want to get away to late. I did have enough time to skin and bone out the 156 pound barrow that I caught two nights before so that Chris could see how I boned out my animals.