Most people will know Sam and Adam from the crusaders rugby team. Recently these two guys have got into the sport of pig hunting and have both acquired a young nine month old dog each out of the same litter. Sam had a bitch, Dot and Adam had a dog, Jack. They only came in for a couple of hours training so I got the pigs to come down the bottom for a feed to make it easier to get the dogs onto them. We put Breeze in first with Adam’s dog Jack on a rope.
The two dogs had two of the grey boars for a start and I could see Jack pulling on the rope wanting to get at the pigs but Adam had a good hold of the rope and kept the dog back far enough so that he could not come to any trouble. After five minutes I said to Sam to let his bitch, Dot in as well. She was also on a rope and was pulling towards the pigs but could not get them. Within a couple of minutes I could see that the two dogs were starting to settle down so I took the rope off Dot and she was happy to stand back and bark.
Next I said to Adam to let Jack get a bit closer to the pigs so that the pig could throw him backwards to let him know not to stand to close. At this stage Jack was quite happy to stand back as well so we took his rope off him too. Once they had been bailing away for some time we decided to stir things up a bit so we put some pressure on the boars to get them to break. It was the light grey boar that took off with the dogs in hot pursuit. The training dogs stuck with the boar for a bit but did come back to us so we had to take them up to where Breeze had the boar bailed to get them to join in again. Once they where back on the boar bailing with us standing back they really started to step up as the boar broke a couple more times with the dogs now sticking with him. After the dogs had been bailing for quite some time I left the Whitelock boys with their dogs on this boar while I went and took Breeze back to her kennel and swapped her for Lightning hopping that he would go away and bail one of the other boars. On entering back into the block with Lightning the main boar was standing at the food trough having a feed so Lightning and I walked around him and carried on up the hill to the others. The grey boar that I left them with had shot through so we headed up the gully with full intentions of getting Lightning to go and bail one of the other pigs for us. I don’t know what was going though Lightning’s head but he just did not want to go out and find a pig for some reason so we headed back down to the gate where the main boar was still hanging around. We had some good bailing going on here and there where no small pigs around so I took the muzzles off all three dogs. This put a bit more pressure on the boar and he tried breaking the bail quite a few times with the dogs having to get right in there to stop him each time, this really got the training dogs worked up. By the time we called the dogs out they had been on the pigs for over two hours.
In short these two dogs went from being full on wanting to have a go at the pigs, to standing back bailing to not sticking with them on the break to wanting to stop them . So in such a short time they had learnt so much.