Over the winter months is always the best time of the year to catch pigs. As long as we have trained our dogs well we should be catching some good pigs. Before I write about some of the pigs that I have caught recently I want to explain a conversation that I had with a chap recently. He was telling me that he does not believe in training his dogs he would rather just get them out hunting. If there is anyone else out there that thinks like this chap, then you are not only letting yourself down but you are also letting your dogs down. Most pig hunters also follow rugby so I am going to explain this in rugby terms. Richie Macaw and Dan Carter are two of our best rugby players so they should not need to go to training. Once we have convinced them that training is a waste of time next we could convince them that they do not need Graham Henry, because they are already the best. Next rugby season we would get to see the results of our change in thinking. Any sports team that is not performing to there full potential the first person to get the chop is the coach because they have the biggest impact over the whole team.
With pig hunting every pig hunter who has a dog is responsible for getting the best out of each of their dogs. As pig hunters we must know how each of our dogs think and how they act, sometimes we may have to take a dog out of our pack because it is causing the other dogs to under perform. To get the best out of our dogs we need to look at the many different ways that we can train them. If we go back to the All Blacks we know that they train in the gym at the swimming pool and at the rugby ground and when they play a rugby match that is a true test of whether there training is paying off. So when we go back to our pig dogs we should not only think about taken them out hunting but also our training. To me hunting is putting the dogs to the true test to see if the training that they have been getting is working.
This winter I had the added advantage of having a new young dog in my pack Lightning. He is a Greyhound/Lab and breed by Jeff and Grant Dennison. I picked him up at 3 ½ months of age. He was a natural right from the start, within 2 minutes on his first pig he was joining in. I did not take Lightning out for his first hunt until he was 6 ½ months old. Up until this point his training consisted of understanding my commands, perfecting and performing them as well as at least 10 hours a week bailing pigs. By using the tone of my voice he was taught how to avoid small pigs and would only bail the bigger pigs. He had also been introduced to sheep, possums, rabbits and the many other different untargeted animals.
On his first hunt in the wild the dogs bailed a 118 pound boar. This pig was found only 100 metres away. Lightning was there on the find and stayed with the pig the whole time. As I approached the boar he was facing down hill with the dogs out in front of him so I could not get a safe shot with the rifle and I did not want to call the dogs off as there was a game trail just below, if the pig had got past this I would have a big carry on my hands. My best option was to get down behind the boar and stick him which is something that I do not like to do as this teaches the dogs to go in and grab. Once I got a hold of the boars tail the dogs carried on bailing as I stuck the him in behind the front shoulder. I could not fault Lightnings first performance on a pig out in the wild.
Lightnings second pig was picked up off the four wheeler. While he new that a pig had crossed over the track during the night he could not work out where it had gone to. The other two dogs on this hunt where Breeze and Cloud. Cloud loves a challenge and if he can smell a boar he will put in a super effort to find and bail the pig and today was no different. Two gullies and 800 meters later Cloud opened up with a nice bail in a face of bracken. That pig stayed bailed in the same place even when Lightning and Breeze arrived. This boar weighed 108 pounds.
On my next hunt in this area I had Cloud, Lightning and Sky. The three dogs caught a small 60 pound boar, while I was carrying this out Cloud tracked away and I lost GPS reception at 1.9 km as he tracked over the top of the hill. From the top of the hill I picked up Cloud on the GPS away down in one of those really ugly looking gullies that would take a marathon effort to get a pig out. Lightning and Sky where told to stay in heel at this point as I did not want them away down there. As I was listening to Cloud bailing I heard the pig try and break, as Cloud gave the pig a lesson in don’t try and run. I could tell by the squeal that the pig was about the size of the other pig that I already had. I could not see the point of going another km away from the four wheeler when I already had one pig to carry out to the bike 2.5 km away, so from 1.03 km away I whistled Cloud off the pig. It took a couple of minutes before Cloud heard me but he did come off that pig and return to me. If I had not done my initial training with Cloud I would have had to go all the way to that pig and either release it or kill it and carry it 3 ½ km back to the bike and then go back and get the other pig. With the right training I had just saved myself over an hours work on a pig that I would not have taken anyway.
Another pig that Sky bailed up was a 70 pound sow. I was not about to kill this pig as she was in the forestry and it was to be the second time that the dogs had bailed her. On this day she was bailed 800 meters up a native gut with a four wheel drive track in the bottom of the gully. Rather than just calling the dogs off her and letting her go I decided to see if I could get the dogs and pig as close to the track as I could. I called the three dogs into heel and watched as the pig made a break for it. Giving her a thirty second head start I sent only Lightning after her, each time he would find and bail her on his own. On the third time Lightning bailed her right beside the four wheel drive track. Lightning at this stage was just over 7 months old.
Hunting with technology has its advantages when running a long distance finder. Both Cloud and Lightning tracked away over 1 km before Lightning decided to come back to me. I finally lost cloud on the GPS so I rode the four wheeler around the forestry road in the general direction that he had gone. Four km away from where Cloud started tracking he had caught up with his pig off the side of the road. This would have to be one of those easy pigs, as I turned the motor bike off both Lightning and Sky heard Cloud and went to join in on the bail. I got to film this pig as he was in some open pines, when the pig saw me he gave a deep growl but the dogs had the better of him and he new that he had no options left. I had to call Cloud out as he was standing in the line of fire, once he was clear the boar took a slug between the eyes. The 85 meters to the road was just a case of rolling the pig down hill to the bike.
I was at the Ashburton hunting competition this year when a farmer came up to me and asked if I would like to come out to his place and catch some pigs for him as he knew there where a few around. So a hunt was planed. At this stage Lightning was 7. ½ months old. On the Friday morning a friend of mine, Michael and I arrived at Grahams farm at 7.30 am in miserable conditions, it was pouring down with rain and that was the way it stayed all day. Graham had his son Nigel along for the hunt. I had brought along only two dogs Lightning and Cloud, we had been walking over an hour before the dogs showed some real interest. We all headed in the same direction as the dogs but where being left behind until they finally stopped 1 km away up on top of a hill in some big pines. Without the GPS we would never have found them as we climbed the hill we could only hear the bail from 150 meters away. As we approached this boar he was standing in semi open ground with the two dogs doing a great job of keeping him bailed without getting him worked up. Even though that boar could see us he did not try and break as he was so busy concentrating on the dogs. That 108 pound boar was shot from side on behind the ear. We were back at Grahams house by midday looking forward to a hot cuppa and some dry clothes. It was arranged that I would be back in the morning for another look around. Next morning I had my son Bryce with me along for a walk. The weather was looking a lot better. When I looked at the pig that we had caught the day before there was not one but two pigs there. Graham said that he had taken his heading dog and a mastiff that had only seen two pigs before this one, out for a walk the night before and they grabbed a 110 pound boar and all he had with him was a pocket knife. Both dogs sustained a number of injuries as the boar had a good set of hooks on him. This morning we headed back up into the pines. The first bit of fresh sign we found got the dogs keen and they tracked away 300 meters up into a native gut and put up a short bail before the young boar decided to head elsewhere, as he came running across the track that we were standing on I lined up for an easy shot that totally missed and the pig made another 100 meters down the hill before the dogs bailed him again. By the time the three of us got down there Nigel had already stuck the pig. Nigel said that every time he tried to get close to the pig it would charge him until he finally got a hold of that 80 pound boar. As we where carrying this pig out Cloud tracked away again to a real shitty thick face of native. To get to the dogs we had to push through a whole lot of gorse. This boar was no ordinary pig as he had seen a lot of dogs before today and every time we tried to get close to him he would break another 50 meters. In the end I said to Graham and Nigel that we would have to wait back while Bryce snuck in on his own as it was us breaking this pig not the dogs. So the three of us were waiting 50 meters back from the bail waiting to hear the rifle speak. Bryce said as he was sneaking in he saw the boar standing in amongst the roots of an upturned tree with the dogs out the side, as the boar saw him it took one step forward before the bullet finished off that 120 pound boars days of wandering the hill. By the time we got to the boar Bryce was very excited as this boar had a very good jaw on him. This jaw is now mounted on a shield, hanging on the wall in Bryce’s room along with a few others.
All of these hunts were over one month, from Lightning being 6 ½ months to 7 ½ months old. We can see what can be achieved with a young dog with the right training. A big difference between hunting and training is that hunting can take all day for very little results but training can be as short as two minutes for good results. All dogs and people start wanting to learn at different age’s If we as the roll model do not pick up on when they are ready to start learning and do not give them the time that they require then they will start learning things for themselves and normally the things that get the biggest reaction from an adult are the bad things.
I recently gave two speeches at the Geraldine High School to the year 9 and year 10 students. I spoke about business management, time management, positive thinking, learning and of course pig hunting. I explained to the students how one person in there class can have very good marks and another person can have poor marks when the teacher has said the same things to the whole class. That is because we all perceive things differently so a teacher has to choose there words very carefully because what they say could be taken two different ways. If someone was to say that a pig got away from there dogs some people would think that there dogs were not that good. Other people may think that it must have been a good pig to get away. If we go back to an earlier part of my article where I mention that I missed shooting that 80 lb boar some people may think that I am a bad shot but I did not mention that I had taken the rifle apart the night before to clean because it was wet and when I put it back together I did not put the sights in the right place. Now if I did not shoot at that pig and work this out then I would not have adjusted the sights and Bryce may have missed his good boar later in the day.
Are you a positive thinker or a negative thinker.
I want to finish with a letter that I received from one of the Geraldine high school students.
” Thank you for talking to us, I really appreciate it. When I first found out that you where going to talk to us I thought I should have brought a pillow because it would be so boring. I was surprised to find out how interested I was and how interesting your talk was. The thing I enjoyed most about your talk was the power of positive thinking. It really got my attention and made me realise that I tend to do that quite a lot. From now on I am going to try not to talk myself into failing before I even try my best. I also enjoyed hearing your pig hunting and dog training stories. I liked some of your quotes such as “nobody gets a second chance at life” and “we are worth more than $12.50 an hour”. More people who have motivating and interesting stories should do what you are doing, as it is helping students to decide what they want to do with there life.”