Michael travelled up from down South with three dogs for some training. His oldest Dog Binby was three years old and straight staffy. His younger Dog Nig was of mixed breeding and about two years old and the third Dog was only eight months old, Smirf. For our first run we took Nig and Fog and it did not take to long before we had Nig off the rope and bailing with Fog on the black and white boar. On our second run we took Bindy with Lightning. Now Bindy was a different Dog all together. Being three years old she thought that she knew all about pig hunting and did not like being on a rope or listening to any one else while there was a pig around. She reminded me of a worker who had been doing the same job for a while so thought that they knew what they were doing. Until you can show a worker like this that there is a better way to do a certain job they just won’t listen. When I put Bindy into a submissive position she would just keep wriggling and trying to get back up.
It took a while to get through to her but we did finally get to the stage of letting her off the rope with the main boar. She was a very reluctant bailer and three times the boar grabbed her in his mouth and shock the hell out of her. As soon as she was free she was straight back onto him. To me she will be the sort of dog that may get killed on a big pig but in the mean time she could kill a lot of small pigs. We only gave Bindy the one run in the block because we could see that she could have got herself seriously hurt.
Next morning we took Fog with Nig and Smirf, we managed to find all of the boars resting up together, or at least resting until we arrived. The dogs bailed them all for a while until the dark grey boar broke out with the dogs hot on his tail where the stayed for the next hour with him trying to break a number of times only to be pulled up again and again by the dogs. On our last run we took Lightning with Nig and Smirf and this time we got onto the ginger boar and he gave the dogs a good run for their money. The ginger boar is only about 110 pounds but is a good little scrapper and any Dog that underestimates him will be in for a good dust up.
Summing up if I was hunting these dogs I would be using Nig as the main Dog with Smirf as the second Dog. I would not use Bindy as she would just teach the other two dogs to become harder and that would just create more vet bills and kill a lot more small pigs before they could be let go.
