This year the three old boars that I had in the training block for the past nine years had been attacked by the younger boar Kevin Bacon. Kevin had been in the block for over two years and was the young boar growing up. Kevin had been caught in the wild and raised on a lifestyle block untill he became too big and was offered to me. He was very good for dog training as im sure he thought he was a dog. When ever I was in the block with dogs Kevin would find us and he loved playing with all dogs.
but as he matured he became aggressive to the older boars to the extent that at the start of the year he killed the black boar and the black and white boar. Then in June he killed Boris who with the help of a pully I managed to lift him up to get his weight which with stomach in was 284 lb so he was not a small pig.
Withing a couple of weeks of killing Boris Kevin disappeared leaving me with no training boars in my block. When I mentioned this to the guys at my local pig hunting club one one of the boys offered me a boar that he had originally got off me as a young one. Pumba up untill now had a small area to live in so this was a the big wide world to him. My pig block is about 35 acres of pines, native and a wee bit of open ground. When we first put Pumba into the block I did not see him for the first week However my dogs knew that he was in there as they could smell him. I have the dogs trained well enough to know that they are not allowed to jump into the pig block at anytime unless they have the collars and muzzles on.
Over the second week, Pumba turned up below the house where I had put some food out for him. Now this is where the training comes in as it’s not just about getting dogs to chase pigs but slso getting the pig used to the dogs and the last thing I would want is to have a dog hassling Pumba before he becomes confident in his surroundings. So the food has helped him to calm down and know that while the dogs are barking at him from the other side of the wire, they see are not going to jump the fence and attack him. This will help his confidence grow so that when the time comes to put dogs on him he will stand and fight rather than run. Now a couple of weeks on he shows up at feed time and sometimes during the day and the dogs love barking at him from the opposite side of the fence which he is now happy to be a part of this game. When we think about this from all angles it’s just a conversation between two different parties and as long as we can take the aggression out, it’s much easier to keep things under control. Pigs speak a different language than dogs, just like we speak a different language however the tones of our languages are universal we can tell the difference between nice and aggressive, loud and quiet.
If we were to walk into a room full of people who were talking calmly we would be relaxed. On the the other side if we walked into a bar room brawl we would react completely differently.
One of my best teachers was Leroy the best dog that I have had so far and I used to think if only I could take his brain and put it into a younger dog I would have the perfect dog. Now we know that is not possible However what he has taught me I want to pass on to my up coming dogs and because I hunted a lot in open tussock I got to see why Leroy was so successful in catching Pigs and that was he knew when to use aggression and when not too. I would regularly see him track into a small area of tussock and be stationary for a bit before just giving one bark then slowly getting in to a nice calm bail as he would calm the pig down rather than work it up.
So back to Pumba he is getting close to the right mindset where I can start using him for dog training as long as I don’t let any dogs actually attack him. To do this every dog will be wearing a muzzle. It quickly becomes noticeable which dogs I can remove the muzzles from our those dogs that definitely need the muzzle on.