With my wife Janice having a 4am start in the mornings I had planned an early bath. Not your ordinary bath but our outdoor bath that I had to light a fire under to heat the water. So just after 5pm the bath was ready to go and we had a good soak until 7pm. At one point while we were in the bath I heard the dogs barking in their kennels and instantly knew that there must be a pig annoying them. I quick yell out and they shut up. All was good as we had an early night until I was woken about 10pm with an elbow in the ribs and informed that my dogs were barking again, so out with the torch and there on the other side of the gate was a large white boar.
I quickly recognized him as a boar out of Mr Pig’s block. This boar was getting some size about him and I had been thinking about putting him into the training block but as yet don’t have a gate between them. This is the first time that he had made it around to the dog kennels as he would have had to go through two electric fences. So I got dressed and went out to give him a hurry up back to his own area. Jeff always sleeps in the shed now so is always off, so with him and I let the two young dogs, Shade and Sassy out for a run.
They were quick to get onto him and give him a hurry up. They ran down the hill and around along beside the drive through under a taranaki gate into the holding paddock before the dogs came back to me. I was hoping that the boar had gone back through the two electric fences back to his own area. 10.30pm and I was getting back into bed. Midnight and I got that sharp pain in the ribs again to once again tell me to shut those dogs up. This time I was not in such a good mood with this boar so I let out Fog, Shade and also Jeff, it did not take Fog too long to put up a good bail in the crap face between the drive and the creek.
I was hopping with a bit more pressure on him he would break all of the way back to his own block. After watching this bail for ten minutes it became apparent that he was not going to let these dogs move him any further as he was doing his best to give a dog a tattoo so I had enough of him. I walked back up to the house and grabbed my riffle and knife then went and let the other two dogs, Snow and Sassy out to go and join in. This bugger was not about to give me another night of no sleep. With the five dogs on him he had a lot of pressure so broke into the creek where he made his last stand. While I was in with them at one point he charged right past me almost knocking me over. To get the shot in was not straight forward as I had to put the torch in my mouth, hold the Camera/phone in my left hand and the riffle in the right hand. Before I could shot I had to call the dogs out of the line of fire then BOOM. Down he went with the dogs diving in to make sure he was not about to get back up. It was good to see that Shade stayed with the boar as he buggered off a couple of days earlier when we were shooting clays as the gun shot must have giving him a fright.
I had to drag the boar about 40 meters through some real crap then out into the holding paddock another 60 meter drag to where I could get the motorbike to. Back at the house I put all of the dogs away apart from Jeff and went and collect the boar. I brought him out with the guts in to see what the difference was in weight before and after gutting. With the guts in he went 182 pounds and once gutted he went 155 pounds. Finally got back to bed at 2am with no more dogs barking.