Bro has been growing so fast lately that he can now keep up out on the hill. I have got him listening to me so getting him to do things is not too hard. So far I have still not had to put a rope on him to come to me. Some of the things we have worked on are getting up into his kennel, although he can not jump up yet he does put his feet up and waits for me to lift him. I have also been teaching him how to walk through gates as a lot of young dogs get confused at gates if a person does not spend a wee bit of time with them and he knows how to stand on the back of the four wheeler when I’m riding somewhere.
Most of his training in the pig block has been with only Rastus or one other dog as to many dogs change the dynamics of the bail with too much pressure causing the boar to break.
Bro’s natural instinct with the pigs is to stand back and bark so it going to make the training so much easier. I see a lot of dogs that don’t think and just want to fight with the pigs and these dogs tend to damage a lot of meat on smaller pigs and get hurt on the bigger boars.
So for Bro’s 1st hunt I took him across the gully from my house with my other 3 Dogs, Fog, Tig and Rastus. As the dogs started getting interested in a bit of scent Fog went one way and Tig went the other way. I knew when Tig was stationary on the GPS that he would have found a pig and he was there for a good minute before he gave off a bark. As soon as Rastus heard this he tracked down and joined the bail one hundred meters below me. They only bailed for about a minute before the boar broke and the dogs next stopped him two hundred meters away. Bro followed me down untill I was closer in the last couple of meters in the tight scrub when I heard him try and bail but this boar was having no part of it and I think at this stage Tig got a small poke in the neck before he broke again. This time they bailed him one hundred meters above the road on a fence line in the bush. While Bro did have a couple of barks from a safe distance he was definitely showing a bit more respect to this boar now. To get in close for a shot without breaking him was not easy and I took a shot from two meters out which had him breaking down the hill for the road where the dogs bailed him for the last time as the bullet had taken its toll, so it was an easy job of finishing with the knife.