With Gus now stepping up it gives me too much dog pressure on the pigs.
This leaves me with either of two options, either I leave dogs behind when I go hunting or put Muzzles on the three pig dogs so they can’t damage any pork. The only dog that does not have a muzzle is Tig the possum dog, he can’t catch kill and retrieve a possum with a muzzle on. Tig is under very good command so I can just talk to him to keep him from going to hold a pig.
This week I got the dogs out three times. On the first hunt the dogs caught a small pig that without Muzzles could have quickly killed it yet I managed to call them off without the pig being biting.
On the second hunt Gus found and bailed a nice eating young boar that they bailed until I got Tig to hold him for me to stick.
Third hunt I took out Sam Edward’s from our pig hunting club. Sam brought along two dogs, his main bitch Lou and younger dog Dutch. I took Bro and Gus, while I was putting Muzzles on them Sam mentioned that his younger dog Dutch was hard on the Pigs so we could put a muzzle on him too.
For this hunt we headed to one of my neighbors who had pigs digging up their driveway so I parked the truck up not far from where I hoped the pigs would be. We only walked less than one hundred meters when the dogs went up above the track. We heard one bark then the pigs broke. Next we heard Gus bail up so we headed back around the track below the action when the boar broke out beside me aiming to cross the track. It was a quick shot from about two meters away as the boar did not faulter. I was starting to dought my shot when I noticed a red section in the back of his front shoulder. Gus, Bro and Dutch tracked past us and bailed the boar opposite us which looked real good but with the bullet in him the dogs had no trouble keeping him there.
As soon as I started gutting him Sam said I can hear Lou bailing. So I quickly gutted this boar then headed off to the next one. This second boar was in the creek and he was fired up with four dogs hassling him in a tight spot. I’m sure if the dogs did not have Muzzles on they would have been trying to hold him. It was Lou that grabbed him while we were close so Sam jumped in and grabbed a back leg while I put the knife to work.
Summing up the use of the dog Muzzles, they have worked extremely well with no pigs getting away because of them and limiting any meat damage.
There will be people out there that think a dog won’t be able to stop a pig wearing a muzzle because every time they catch pigs the dogs are holding them. Because I train dogs and have my own pigs I get to see how they interact together. We are all similar in the way we all need food to survive, we all need to reproduce and we all react according to our environment. In conflict we react in a fight or flight mode. We don’t run away from something that we don’t feel threatened from. It was many years ago that my old dog Leroy taught me how best to work with the pigs. The older he became the less aggression he used and with hunting him in the open tussock country he could easily convince the pigs that it was easier to stay and listen to him talk. I used to think at the time if I could just take his brain and put the into a younger dog would be great, obviously that can’t happen but I can take what he has taught me and use that in my training.