Julian had driving all the way down from Hawera in the North Island with his eleven year old son Joshua and two of his dogs for some extra training. One thing that I found out was that a return sailing across cook strait on the ferry for him and his son was just over $400. It does not cost any more for the dogs as long as they are in a confined dog box. If dogs are tied onto the back of a truck then they would have to go in a create that the ferry have at a cost of $15 per dog.
Young Joshua found the trip very tiring but the dogs would have been pleased to be out of the box and running around. Messy got her name the day Julian picked her up. He stopped at a shop to get some puppy food and when he returned to his vehicle only two minutes later their was dog shit and spew all though his vehicle. His other dog Bucky was brought three weeks prior to coming and seeing me.
Bucky was supposed to be a going pig dog. For our first run we went into the small training block with Fog and one training dog, it did not take long to realize that we could add both of Julian’s dogs in together as they were very standoffish. Whenever the pig would break Bucky would have a bit of a run after it but we could not get Messy to show an interest, in fact she seemed to be scared of the pigs. Whenever the boar turned on either dog they would run in the opposite direction as far as they could with out looking behind until they got to a fence. I could see that I needed to change the way that I was doing things. So we went into the main pig block to target the grey boar Boris. The good thing about having a number of pigs is that I know how each pig reacts to dogs, Boris always tries to run which most of the time gets other dogs wanting to join in. We chased Boris all around the block for half an hour with Fog and still could not get these two dogs to join in.
As we were walking back up and out of the block we had to walk past some of the pigs, Bucky was quite nervous walking past them but Messy was a real mess as she would not go anywhere near them. After this run we took the motor bike to the top to see what the dogs were like around the sheep, there was no problem there as they did not show any signs of either running away from them or running at them, so this was good. I had to have a rethink on how I was going to train these dogs as I hate the thought of failure. The plain that I came up with was to just give them short bursts of ten to fifteen minutes on the pigs with two of my dogs bailing each time. Slowly we could see improvements with both dogs it was Bucky that was starting to show more interest in the boars than Messy. Next morning it was a different story with Bucky, all night long while he was sitting in his dog box he would have been thinking about those pigs and now that he was going to get another go at them he did not want to wast this opportunity, he was a different dog. When he arrived the day before he was scared of the pigs to now he was right in their face bailing hard out. I wish I could have said the same about Messy but she is still a young bitch and now Julian knows that he has got to do a bit of work with her to get her to gain a bit more confidence in every thing that she does.
Another big advantage that I did notice over these training sessions was that my dog Thunder who has always acted like a pup and not grown up even though he is now two years old has finally started to grow up. This is something that I wrote in one of my previous posts when I picked up my new pup Snow that this should make Thunder grow up as he would no longer fell like the pup in the team.