Normally I start one new pup every two years this way I have a good age gap between my dogs. However this year I had decided to get a new pup early as my last pup Fog is only 16 months old. I had a number of reasons for doing this. One of those reasons was losing one of my main dogs Cloud recently so I have room for another dog. Also with moving onto our land, I am right there for training at any time.
So now that I had made the decision to get a new pup I next had to find the right pup that would suit me. I was originally going to look for a breed that I had not yet tried but when Richard Hand said that he had mated his main bitch with Fogs brother I decided to get one of these pups. The pups were born on the 5/3/2013 so last weekend I traveled down to Dunedin to pick up my latest addition to my team of dog’s. As people who know me know that I like to give my dogs a name that is associated with a weather pattern so Thunder is his name.
I had the second pick of a pup out of this litter but my main priority was to get a dog that looked different from the dogs that I already have. Two of the pups were brindle so one of these where my choice. I have picked up pups in the past that have been sick in the vehicle on the way home but young Thunder was happy to sleep on the passenger seat for the three and a half hour drive home. Once at home thunder has had to get used to a whole new environment. Getting to meet the other dogs the cows, sheep, chickens and the pigs. The main reason that I like to get my new pups top meet all of the different animals is that I like to watch the pup and learn from him at what stages he is at. If he was to start chasing the chickens then it would be easy to discourage him at an early age. That also applies to all of the other animals if I was to catch him chasing one of the sheep I would know that he would be ready to start on the pigs. For hunters that do not have all of these animals around your pup you are missing a very large part of the training process. It is like waiting until our children go to school to start learning. A child that has a parent teaching them all the time will have learnt how to learn well before they start school. With Thunder I want to be there to help him when ever he has a problem with something so that I can help him through, what at the time will be small problems. If these small problems are not fixed at the time they can become big problems and hard to fix.