It’s great to see a hunter who is willing to travel the length of the country to come and see me so that I can help him out with training one of his dogs. Andrew sent his young bitch Tas down on a Tullochs truck. One of her first tests was when I went to put her away into a dog kennel, she just looked at me when I called her. She had just watched me put all of the other dogs away so when I called her I thought she knew what I expected of her but she was still reluctant to come to me. I just showed a little bit of patience and waited for her to make the next move, after about 30 seconds she walked over and calmly got into the kennel. I gave her a calm pat and knew that I had won over her confidence in me. Later I took her into the training block for the first time.
Tas, Snow and Fog stuck with the black and white boar for about twenty minutes before Tas came back looking for me. So I lead her back into the bail with Snow who had also came off the bail. When I finally got in close to the bail in the pines I got to see that Tas was quite standoffish and was not too confident to get in to close to the big nasty boar. This did not worry me as I could see that it was not going to take much to get her confidence up on the pigs and I have her for the next ten – fourteen days until the next truck is heading back up north.
On the Monday afternoon Andrew turned up to see how young Tas worked on the boars. She was still a bit standoffish on the black and white boar and when the bail moved we also had the four younger boars at the bail and every time a dog tried to get close they would charge. This cracks me up because these boars are not really big enough to be able to fight the dogs but they have a lot of confidence and it is good to see that my dogs would back off the pressure on them. Next morning we took Lightning and Thunder in with Tas and bailed the black and white boar again, this time Tas was a lot more confident as she was getting in amongst it. This is what a night in the dog kennel thinking about yesterday’s pigs can do. I was rapt with her progress. We gave her a break while we took the motorbike up the hill for a look at the views.
Later on we went back in again with Fog, Snow and Tas and got onto Boris for another good run and by the time we took Tas out she was getting buggered. After she had been sitting down for an hour or two I called her to come up to the kennels and she was having a hard time just standing up when I Called her to me she just did not want to walk so it took some encouragement to get her up to her kennel. I don’t expect her to make any noise tonight and she might take a day or two to get over the work out that she had put her body through. She is another one of those dogs that has really benefited from the training and I am looking forward to getting her back in the block as soon as she recovers.