Jack Gordon came in for some training with three of his dogs, Chirp is an older bitch and Jacks main dog,Jake is a young eighteen month old that is starting to find and catch pigs, Jack wanted to give him some more work and his youngest dog Rusty is only seven moths old. For our first run we took Jack’s two younger dogs down into the small training block with Mr Pig and black and white but they were a bit reluctant to do much with the boars on their own so I went and got Fog. The dogs first chased the black and white boar around until he managed to get into his A frame shelter. Because the other dogs were not hard I decided to give them a go on Mr Pig. This was a very good run as Jake had to learn to stay on the boar. Young Rusty took a wee bit to get going and I had to use Fog to come back off the boar to me and then encourage Rusty to follow him back in to the bail.
This had a great effect as his confidence started to grow. For our next run we swapped the two younger dogs for Chirp. This was to be the second time that I have had Fog in the block with a bitch and he just does not want to do anything. I find it interesting to see how dogs think and now Fog has got something going on in his head that he does not want to work with certain bitches. Before I got to swap Fog the black and white boar ran out of the training block and pushed his nose under about a six inch gap under the fence leading into the big training block. I did have the electric fence turned off at the time as I always turn it off during training sessions so that a dog does not get a shock at the wrong time. This set Jack and I up with some real interesting viewing as the boars form this block were quick to start a fight with black and white. The first fight started within seconds and I was not quick enough to get the camera out of my pocket.
Both Digger and Boris threw Black and white over three meters into the air and he ended up ten meters down the bank. When he came back up to carry on fighting it was just black and white onto Boris and I just turned my camera on when Chirp went to go between the two Boars as they were fighting which ended with her getting a poke into the stomach for her troubles, luckily it was not to bad. The two boars were really going for it and ended up moving down into the gully out of sight. Later in the evening when it was dark I went down with some food for the pigs and Boris walked up looking all victories with over half a dozen small rips on him for his troubles. At about nine pm I noticed black and white up beside the fence wanting to get back with Mr Pig but not able to. He looked very scared as he disappeared into the trees as soon as I tried to approach him. While down the fence line Mr Pig and Boris were trying to have a fight through the fence and Mr Pig even tried to get a little bit pushy with me. This is where I need to be able to read the pigs body language. People are so focused on using there voice in words to get what they want because we have grown up thinking this way. Animals sense energy so to interact with animals we need to use the right energy. To calm the situation down I first need to be calm with Mr Pig while he was chomping his tusks and approaching me aggressively he was more focused on wanting to attack Boris to stick up for his mate black and white. Not only did I need to have clam positive energy I also needed to stand in the right position and that is just beside the boars front shoulder, when Mr Pig moves I needed to also move so that I was still in the dominant position. If we look at dogs for a second when one dog is being dominant over another dog they will stand facing the same way with the dominant dogs head at the back of the submissive dogs neck if they know their place within the hierarchy they will calm down and walk away if they don’t then a fight can start. So with Mr Pig I was standing behind his neck and using calm assertive energy. While Mr Pig was still worked up because he wanted to fight Boris because he had just beating up his mate he had to know that I was not about to get involved in the fight but he had to calm down around me.
The main reason that pigs fight, dogs fight or even people fight is because of boundaries for these pigs the fence is a physical boundary and in each block the pigs know their hierarchy and live within that system until something changes, this same thing would happen in the wild with one mature boar moving into another mature boars area, all of us pig hunters would have caught a boar at some point in time with rips in them from an encounter with another boar. Boundaries can be an important part of training if you work with them right. For instance’s a dog on a chain in town that sees the neighbours cat can get that worked up that it becomes fixated on attacking cats. With some dogs it is good to hold them back a bit just like people it can make us all that much keener. There is a big turning point in all of our lives and that is through the teenage years when our body’s have grown bigger yet our minds become confident but lack the experience. Three scenarios to explain this, first scenario, one day when I watching my pigs there were six younger boars playing around together just like teenagers and they approached the main boar who was over 180 pounds and tried to fight him. He was quick to try and sort out the first one but by the time he had flicked his head around he had the whole six pigs onto him and he had no option but to turn tail and get out of there. Scenario two I had Leroy out on the hill one day and he was bailing a mob of five pigs when out of the tussock came a sixth pig which grabbed a hold of Leroy by his neck and before he knew it he had six pigs fighting him. He was a tough old character and managed to break himself free and keep bailing them and I took five out of the six. Scenario three I saw on facebook recently of a boxing trainer who looked to be in his later years he had been challenge to a boxing match by a young fit looking twenty year old. This young guy looked real fit and would have been able to do more press ups run further and faster and shag more girls in a night than the old fella but when the young guy came out swinging he threw about three hard inaccurate punches before the old fella plastered him. It took the old fella about ten seconds to give the young fella a lesson that he will not forget for a very long time. Lessons scenario one it does not mater how tough we think we are if we are out muscled we cant win the fight. Scenario two Leroy stepped back from the fight and worked with his brains knowing that I would back him up with great results. Scenario three the knowledge of knowing how to fight is far more important than having the strength and speed.
Back to my training block Boris is the main boar with the pigs yet when the dogs are on him he does not fell confident enough to fight them and instead runs until he is tired then stands. The white boar on the other hand is not the main boar because Boris could beat him up but when it comes to dogs he is so confident that no dog gets to close to him or he will have them. This just goes to show how their minds work.
A bit of back ground on black and white, he was born in the Akatore forest south of Dunedin and I acquired him when he was around one hundred pounds. Whenever a dog would get near him he would just keep running until he was tired before he would bail. About nine months ago he escaped out of the big training block and lived on a ridge opposite my house for a month until one day when I had a mate Malcolm up and we were having a couple of drinks. Without telling Malcolm my intentions I just made out that I was taking Lightning and Breeze for a walk. Lightning did not take long to bail him up and over the next twenty minutes the dogs worked him across and into Mr Pigs area and he has stayed there ever since quite happily. There are only two hot wires around this area so he could easily have got out any time that he wanted but I would like to think that he had no desire to escape as he now sees his job as a dog trainer. Because the two training blocks are right beside each other the boars normally walk up and down the fence line trying to fight each other through the wires and if it was not for the electrics they would wreak the fence. There is no easy way for me to take one pig and put them in another block as I do not have any gates between them yet, which will be another job that I will have to look at but in the mean time it will be interesting to see if Black and white can work out how to get back on his own. If he stays in the big block he will now know his place in the pecking order and will take some time before he can join the rest of the pigs. This is the stuff that I love to learn, how these pigs think.