Dan was only coming in with two dogs but because he had nobody to look after his third dog he had to bring it along. That third dog was a big holder named Demon.
His other two were a bitch and dog out of the same litter. The dog Mahe looked to be the bigger of the two so I thought I would take him up the block first with Breeze as he looked to be the harder of the two. Within a couple of minutes we had him off the rope and bailing well so I got Dan to go and get his bitch, Bear.
As soon as Bear saw the pigs she started going crazy on the end of the rope so I had to put her down on the ground and hold her down to settle her. Once she realised who was in charge she started to settle and five minutes later she to was off the rope with the two dogs doing a great job of bailing. When we got one of the boars to break Dan’s dogs stuck to it well, they impressed me enough to bring just those two dogs up into the block on the next run before dark.
On this second run we got a wee way up the gully before the two dog’s grabbed one of the small pigs so we were quick to get in and tell the dogs off. As we carried on further up the gully we spotted a couple of the pigs together on the semi open face above us. I went up the opposite side from the pigs so that I could look straight in on them to see what the dogs were going to do. Both dogs went up the hill together and as soon as the pigs realised that the dogs were there they took off. Bear did a real good job in stopping the ginger boar and started bailing him under some scrub. She was just getting into the bailing when Mahe let out a couple of yeps as he took of after one of the small pigs, this got Bear to leave the boar that she was bailing and follow Mahe and the wee pig. That wee pig was only about twenty pounds yet it gave both dogs the slip. Once the dogs came back to us we carried on around hoping to run into the bigger pigs again, which is exactly what happened only this time both dogs stuck with the grey boar as he broke a number of times but did not get away. In the end we had to call the dogs off due to a lack of day light.
Next morning we just took Dan’s two dogs in again and this time they bailed another one of the grey boars but they were mucking around a lot and not staying as hard as I would have liked so I left Dan and his dogs there while I went down to get Breeze to help out. As soon as I got back into the block Breeze tracked off and bailed the black boar and it was not to long before the other two dogs arrived on the scene. They had a good run around on this bail as the boar tried to break a couple of times and by the time we took them out of the block the two dogs were ready for a rest.
For our last run Dan asked if we could take his holder up into the block and see if we could get him to bail as he has never seen him bail a pig before. Demon is a very solid dog and takes a bit of holding back but we had him bailing very quickly, mainly because he could not get to the boar for a hold. After a couple of minutes I said to Dan to let Demon get in close enough to the boar so that the boar would through him backwards to teach him to stand back a bit. At first Dan was not to keen but I knew that the boar would not rip his dog just give him a good shunt backwards. This worked well to get Demon knocked backwards but he still wanted to go straight back in. Dan asked if we should give Demon a shock to teach him to stay back out but I was not keen on this idea as Demon was four years old and had held all of the pigs for Dan that he had caught so far so I did not want to stop the dog doing what he was obviously good at. There are good bailing dogs and good holding dogs and Demon was a good holding dog so I would not want to try and change him at his age. At least now Demon would know how to stand back and bark if he should ever get badly hurt.
I thoroughly enjoyed the time while Dan was here as he has some very good ideas and his parting words as he drove out of the gate were, that was the best weekend that I have had for quite some time.