Roy and Jesse traveled up from Dunedin to give their young dogs a run though the block. Roy had a nine month old dog Ruger while Jesse had a slightly younger bitch, Penny. Both dogs were a pleasure to train. When they arrived the sun was beaming down and it would have been well into the twenties. Far to hot to take the dogs up into the block so we done the next best thing that most pig hunters like to do and that is to sit down and enjoy a nice beer. This gave us time to watch the two new dogs and how they interacted with the many animals. Young Penny took a liking to my pet chicken (Chick). It was good to see that she had a good instinct to want to hunt but this was the wrong animal so we had to put the electric collar on her to discourage her from wanting to eat chick. Jesse was impressed with how easy it was to change Penny”s focus away from Chick with out knocking the hunting instinct from her. Both dogs did try and show a slight interest in the sheep but were easy to discourage simply by using our voices. With the day still not cooling off to much we went for a walk down to the waterfall that is at my gate way. The Te Moana river is not a big river but it always surprises people at the sheer size of the waterfall considering the size of the river. Jesse was keen to jump off until I reminded him just how cold that water was.
By 4.30pm the day had cooled down enough to take the dogs up onto the pigs. For this first run I took Breeze and Thunder along with Roy”s dog Ruger. I had put a muzzle on Ruger just so he could not go in and grab any pigs. The dogs bailed up the light grey boar on this run and Ruger got in there and enjoyed the bail. On the second run we took Lightning along with Ruger and Penny. They bailed up the main boar from the block so the dogs had a good work out.
Both training dogs went well and I could even call Lightning back out of the action so that the other two dogs could do the work on their own. With Penny being a bit younger she was coming off the bail from time to time to see Jesse before being encouraged back in again.
Next morning the weather had changed and it was drizzling. We walked almost right around the before Ruger put up a bail on two of the large grey boars. We had a real good bail going here with Lightning, Ruger and Penny.
When the boars did break the dogs stuck with the dark grey boar down into the rough stuff. At this point Lightning stuck with the boar all the time but the other two dog kept coming back to us. We kept this bail going for over an hour. We would let the dogs bail for a while then break the boar again. As time went on the two training dogs were sticking with the boar more each time he broke.
For our last run we went up the hill on the four wheeler to save us a bit of walking. Once into the training block I sent Roy and Jesse around the far side of the block and i was going to take the bike back down the hill. While Breeze did follow them to the far side she turned around and tracked back to me. When I got back down to the bottom of the hill Jesse said the light grey boar had just run through and Roy was up the hill chasing a pig around. I put Breeze away on the scent that Jesse had mentioned and two minutes later she opened up. When Roy came over with the other two dogs he said that they had a run in with the ginger boar. Both dogs had their confidence levels right up there after all of the bailing that they had been doing on bigger boars than this one but this boar is a straight wild boar and loves to give dogs a hard time. Roy said both dogs got thrown out by this boar and backed right off. Once they went and joined Breeze they showed their confidence had not been knocked by the ginger boar.