We regularly hear hunters saying that we are hunting for the table but how many of these hunters are actually thinking this whole process through. When I see footage on you tube or run into hunters out on the hill, the first thing that I notice is that most hunters are hunting with far too many dogs. The out come of hunting with too many dogs is that they damage to much meat. This is not hunting for the table. We as pig hunters are sometimes our own worst enemy.
Even if we only take out one dog on the hill and allow that dog to kill a small pig then we are de stocking the area that we hunt. Don’t fall victim to that old saying if I don’t kill it someone else will. For every small pig that your dogs kill is one less good eating pig that you can catch next year or big boar that you could catch in a couple of years time. If we are really serious about our pig hunting then we would want to look after our sport first by looking after the pigs that are out there.
We also hear about hunters that are releasing pigs into the wild. While this is one way to ensure that there are pigs out there to hunt, it can work better if you have permission from the land owner so they will not let other hunters in to wipe them out again. BUT we should not forget that our government look at this in a different way and if someone was to get caught that person could get into some real trouble. This is why I believe that it is easier to train your dogs to leave those small pigs alone so that they can grow bigger.
How each hunter hunts and how they train their dogs will very and this is where the difference is to weather a dog kills small pigs or leaves them alone.
This is a story about my hunt on the 14/4/2013. I was on my way to visit one of my neighbors who owns a forestry block not far from mine. On the way up his track my three dogs Breeze, Lightning and fog got keen on some scent, fifty meters below the track I heard Lightning grab a small pig as soon as I heard that squeal I gave Lightning a shock on his collar the squealing stopped immediately and he again tracked away so giving him the benefit of the bought I let him track away at just over five hundred meters he again grabbed another small one and again I gave him another shock and called him back to me. Once all the dogs where up one the bike I carried on up to have a yarn with Robbie. While we were sitting having a drink Robbie mentioned that he saw a grey boar on his track a couple of days earlier.
This was all the motivation that I needed to give the dogs another look around on the way out. I was a long way down his track with the dogs working all the way before Fog tracked off with Lightning going the opposite way on the same scent. It was not long before Lightning came back to follow Fog over into the next wee gut before they both opened up with a nice bail. Breeze being the slow old dog she is walked over and joined in on the bail. As I arrived I could see the back of Breeze and Lightning with Fog hidden in the scrub. We where in six year old Douglas furs with a lot of tall tussock, matigouri and some spare grass. When I first got to lay eyes on the pig I could not tell if it was a boar or a sow. When I moved in to look at its head I could not see any tusks so I was thinking that it may have been a sow. Over the next five minutes it charged the dogs three time and while I was close enough to put the gun right up to the back of the pigs head I did not want to pull the trigger just in case it was a sow. What broke the dead lock was the pig charged Fog and he grabbed it by the ear so I quickly jumped in and lifted its tail that was when I noticed a set of nuts. So I knew at this point I would take this pig.
Normally I do not like sticking pigs because it teaches a dog to want to go in and hold but in the situation I was quick to put the knife to work. I was quick to discover that this was a pig that I had caught before as he had my ear mark on him. This always gives me a good feeling knowing that if I had killed this pig the first time that I had caught it I would not have got onto a pig today.
Back at home I hung the pig up for the night to cool down and set properly. Next morning I was to find out a few more things about this pig. With the ear mark I knew that I had caught him before but as I skinned him his carcass started to tell me the story of which dog had caught him the day that he was ear marked.
All hunters should know their dogs well enough to know which dog prefers to grab a certain part of a pig to stop them.
My nine year old bitch Breeze always bites a pig around the back of its ribs to get its attention, three year old Lightning is the worst of my dogs as he grabs a pig by the front leg, something that I hate to see as a dog doing this can damage a pig real fast so that it can not be released and my young dog Fog has only grabbed the ear of a couple of pigs which if a dog was to grab any part of a pig this would be the best part to grab as they do not wreck any meat.
Getting a dog to change where they prefer to bite a pig is not easy to do because you would need the dog to first bite the pig then change the dog onto the part of the pig that you want it to bite and I do not like my dogs biting pigs as much as I do not like seeing my pigs being biting by dogs.
Knowing where each dog bites helps to tell a story for every pig hunter as they skin their pig. This is like a different language to a lot of people because they do not know the dogs.
As I started skinning the pig that I caught on Robbie’s I quickly noticed that the young boar had a lot of damaged tissue around one of his front legs, this told me that it would have been Lightning the had caught this pig. Because the young boar was 93 pounds this indicated that he was about one year old. Normally I make my cut off around the sixty pound mark as a can not see the point in killing a pig smaller than this unless the pigs are on private land damaging good pastures. So the chances are that I would have caught this pig near the end of last winter or leading into summer last year.
As I have been writing this I have some pork bones marinating for a BBQ later on today as I have one of my son’s Sloan coming up with his young five month old dog Mack and his brothers three month old bitch Dusky, also I have a work mate Jason turning up for a day out with one of his kids so we will be eating pork bones for lunch so I guess you could say that I was hunting for the table.