Stock training for any young dog is very simple all I do is get a pup around stock while they are young. A young dog will always look at the older dogs and learn from their behaviour. It always pays to be around to watch how the young dog reacts to each giving situation. Snow likes being with me when I feed the pigs so he is getting to see how they react. He is starting to play the bailing game with my smallest pig Snuffles which is great to watch. When I am walking somewhere with the dogs Snow keeps wanting to get in front of the other dogs and start barking at them.
This game is setting him up well for when he does decide to want to work the pigs. At the moment I do not want to encourage Snow to bark at the pigs because he will learn this himself when he is ready. If I was to try and encourage him to go and bark at the pig it might get him thinking wrong and start to chase the pig. This is where I see a lot of hunters doing things differently than me. Most young pig dogs get to see their first pig when the hunter gets down to a pig that the dogs are giving a hiding to. I would never want to start a young dog like that for the simple reason, you are teaching the dog to be aggressive to another animal.
If a dog learns this behavior it can be harder to train the dog to calmly work the pig. So with Snow when he does decide to start barking at the boars they will still be standing in front of him not running because they to are used to him. So what will happen for Snow is he will learn to stand back and bark at a pig and not chase them everywhere. My main dog Fog does not chase pigs he bails pigs. I do not hear a bark from him until he bails a good pig and he is so fast that a pig works out real quick that they can’t out run him but he does not want to attack the pig either so they just stand for him.
He understands how a pig thinks rationally before they get worked up. It is not just with the pigs that Snow is getting a lot of training on I am also taking him around the sheep all the time. When I first ran him up the hill behind the motor bike he was a bit reluctant to run through the sheep but he is learning fast and watching how the other dogs are moving through the sheep. Snow will progress through these experiences to become confident around sheep.
Stock training around sheep is that easy. When he gets to the stage of wanting to bail the pigs I might see him look at the sheep but as long as I am watching for this stage it will just be a mater of me talking to him. Another big part of the stock training where a lot of hunters go wrong is giving their dogs a hiding if they take off after a rabbit, possum or hare. Giving a dog a hiding for this behavior can stop your young dog from wanting to hunt and you can end up with a dog that walks with you all day. The block around my hut has a few hares and rabbits running around which Jeff catches the odd one but they have so much cover and are very fast. If my pig dogs track around this area I know what they will be tracking but I do not stop them at this point because when they are out hunting I don’t want them coming back to me when they smell the wrong animal. Fog know that its ok to track them but don’t let the boss catch you actually chasing one. Its quit funny watching him when he is tracking around the hares when he gets close enough that he sees one he will move away and make out he hasn’t seen it. Lightning on the other hand is starting to get a bit lazier because he knows that Fog can find the pigs better than him so he does not run around the same and I never see him tracking or chasing hares. Thunder has been caught out taking off after a hare trying to break out but the electric collar makes short work of that. I don’t get him to hard on the collar because I don’t want to knock his ability to want to hunt. Snow is still to young for this stage as he can not run fast enough yet.