Macka has just recently been in for some training on the pigs. Up until this point Macka had been out pig hunting and seen some pigs being caught but had not done much himself. When out hunting he would look like he was hunting well running here there and every where just not catching pigs. The biggest thing for Macka is he has a fetish for retrieving sticks. So here was Macka his owner Cory and his young son Ollie up in the pig block. We had both Breeze and Fog bailing three grey boars and here was Macka sitting at our feet with a stick waiting for someone to throw it so he could bring it back to us. After a couple of minutes with Macka showing no interest in the other dogs or the pigs Cory picked up Macka’s stick and threw it into the middle of the three boars. Cory was gutted to watch his dog sneak around Breeze and Fog and wait until he could see an opening then he shot in grabbed his stick and came back and dropped it at Cory’s feet waiting to play this game again. After a couple of failed attempts to get Macka to bail by throwing the stick in amongst the pigs I suggested that we try a different approach. Over the years
I have witnessed a lot of dogs that won’t bark at a pig while the owner is there as they are not sure if they are allowed to or not. So we walked back thirty meters from the bail and ignored Macka, even though he was sitting at our feet wanting to play fetch. After quite some time one of the boars had had enough of the bailing game and wanted to spice things up a little. As he charged the dogs the tempo went up and this was enough to get Macka to go down and see what was happening. As the pigs settled back down Macka came back to us until again one of the boars charged at the dogs. This time Macka stayed around a bit longer so the next time a boar charged he was right there and thought this was a great game to play, more fun than chasing a stick any way. This took near on thirty minutes to get to this stage so things where going very slow but starting to look up. Over the next thirty minutes the dogs had split the pigs up and had one boar singled out and where bailing well. While this boar was trying to charge the dogs they where putting a lot of pressure on him and causing him to keep trying to break or fight the dogs. This was where Cory got to see for the first time dogs settling a pig down. Most pig hunters only see dogs working a pig up and worrying the pig until it can no longer run. All I had to do was call Breeze into heel to take the pressure off the pig and he settled back down as long as no dog was trying to grab him he was happy to sit on his backside to protect his nuts.
I did notice that Macka was starting to come back to us for reassurance so while he was bailing I called all of the dogs into heel and we went back to the hut for a break. This has a couple of advantages, when you call a dog away from something that they are enjoying they can’t stop thinking about it and I knew by the time we got Macka back up into the block he will be straight into the pigs. The other advantage was that Cory and I could sit down with a beer to relax and talk about what had just transpired. While Cory was annoyed with Macka’s first thirty minutes in the block he was also completely blown away with how Macka had changed in the second thirty minutes and commented that to put that much training into the dog would take him a minimum of six hunts and even then the training would have been more of dogs grabbing the pigs. On the second run in the block Macka was straight into it and gave it his best for the next hour. By the time this run had finished Cory reckoned that Macka had learn’t as much in that two hours of training that would have taken him twelve hunts to get the dog to do as well as it was.