I like to start a new pup every two years so now that my youngest dog Thunder is about two years old it was time to think about starting my next pup. Rather than just any old pup I had the chance to breed my main dog Fog over Hayden Manson’s bitch Ruby who I had had through the block and liked the look of. Ruby had a litter of eleven pups of which ten survived the birth. I had been after a white pup for a long time so I was rapt to find out that Ruby had a male pup with a lot of white and black spots on it. My wife Janice picked up the pup for me on her way back from Christchurch.
Young Snow was in a cat cage on the way home which was good as he did make a bit of a mess of it as well as whining all the way home. I did not arrive home until 1am in the morning as I had been down in Owaka judging their hunting competition. When I first let him out of his kennel the sheep were around and he tried to chase after them which I thought was a good sign that he wanted to hunt, however ten minutes later one of my older sheep, Mossy bunted him into the ground so I had to get in quick so the little fellow did not get hurt. He has fitted in very quickly, he already knows to stay down the back with the other dogs. The first time I took him up the hill on the motor bike he jumped off the front and I was lucky enough not to run him over. That wee fright was enough to convince him that it was safer to just stay on the front of the bike.
It took him the first couple of days to settle in and gain some confidence around the other dogs and now he is starting to chase after Fog and Thunder when they are playing. The only training that I am doing with him at this stage is to get him to come up to me. All I need to do for this is when I am near him is to call him to me and give him a pat. He did have a problem with walking right in front of my feet at first so I had to be careful not to stand on him but what I did do is any time that he was right in front of my feet and I was walking I would carry on through with my step which would push him aside. I would not kick him hard enough to hurt him just enough to make him realise not to walk in front of me. This bit of training is no different than when you are out hunting and the guy in front of you goes through the bush and it flicks back and gets you in the face, no words need to be said you just make sure you don’t walk so close behind them. When I have a dog walking on my heels out hunting I bring my foot up under that dogs jaw, they quickly learn to stay back a steep or two without a word spoken.
Now that I have Snow one of the biggest differences that I can envisage happening is the whole set up of my team of dogs. Even though Thunder is two years old he still thinks that he is the pup of the team. Thunder still squats to have a piss and when he is on the pigs he still thinks that its a big game. He only barks at the pigs in the block for a short time before coming back to my. What I am expecting is that as Snow starts performing Thunder will not want to be shown up by the younger dog and will start to step up.
At the time of writing this I have only had Snow for five days and he has seen the pigs but I do not want another dog with him at this point as I want him to understand that the pig is just another animal. When he is ready to start barking at them on his own that is when I will put another dog in with him and allow him to bail.
Where I see a lot of young dogs get disadvantaged is that when they get to see their first pig it has got other dogs attacking it and it is squealing out in pain. For those people that can not understand this I will explain this as if I were talking about people rather than dogs as I believe that we have similarities. When a young child sees something out of the ordinary it goes into their minds to make up who that person is going to grow up to be. For a young child that grows up in a gang environment who is regularly seeing violence then that becomes the norm for them so that as they grow they also carry on the cycle. We see business people have children who become business people, workers have children who become workers and unemployed people have children who become unemployed all because of the environment that they are raised in. We also have people who do break out of this cycle but first they have got to want to and this normally comes from an influence somewhere along their journey of life. I find that biggest turning point is having a good roll model and somebody who believes in you.
So now if we go back to the dogs what I have created for Snow is a good positive environment with well balanced dogs that don’t show any unnecessary aggression are happy and know their job so that when Snow is out of his kennel and I am not there I know that he will be learning good habits off the other dogs.