One of the locals Dillon Latimer had a wild boar that he had been feeding for the past two years that he had caught as a piglet in a forest around Blenheim. As his circumstances in life have changed he found that he did not have the spare time to look after this boar and did not want to kill it. His other option was to let the pig go but he did not like the thought of it being caught straight away so he offered him to me for my training block. Normally I do not like putting other pigs into the training block because it is easy to have to many pigs and they just make a real mess. The thing that changed my mind was that this boar was already 180 pounds so he should be able to look after himself when it comes to both dogs and the other pigs.
The one biggest concern that I had was that because of his size and knowing that he had a reasonable set of tusks on him I can not afford to have clients bringing dogs in to train and getting them ripped up to often. To over come this I went to the Geraldine vets and got a price to put the boar to sleep and cut his tusks off. This cost me $188 and I believe that it is money well spent as it should save a lot of vet bills. Once the boar was asleep it only took less than thirty seconds to cut each tusk off using a piece of wire and just
pulling it backwards and forwards. Also while the boar was sleeping I put a part of a staple in his nose. I will explain! if you take a normal fencing staple and cut it just before it bends you will be left with a straight piece of steel with a barb on it if this is put in the end of the pigs snout so that it disappears under the skin it will leave no visual effects but will make it hard for the pig to turn over to much dirt. When the ground is soft they can can dig up but as the ground becomes firm they tend to look for alternative food sources so I do not have all of the pig block
dug up. There is a big difference between putting a ring in the pigs nose compared to a staple. I started using the rings and it slowed down their ability to dig up the ground but it had two major side effects. One was the visual that a photo of a Dog bailing a boar with a ring in its nose does not look good and the other one is that a boar will not act naturally at a bail with a Dog as they are worried about their nose being so tender. This causes the pig to try and look away from the Dog at the bail and this does not happen in the wild.
When I am training Dogs I want things to be as close to how it would be in the wild. Once we had finished with the boar we dragged him from Dillons trailer and onto my ute to cart him up to the training block.
They must have been pretty good drugs that the vet had used because it took the boar over four hours before he started to stir.
Then I had to wait another hour for him to get his balance. By this time it was nine pm at night which only left me with about thirty minutes of day light to see how the other pigs would react to him. When he came out of the back of the ute he fell onto the ground and tried to regain his footing when one of my other boars knocked him off balance and sent him rolling down the hill through the scrub. I spent the next thirty minutes getting between fights as the new boar was still groggy from the anesthetic. By the time
I left the block it was pitch black and the new boar was out on his own.
The next morning I took my young Dog Thunder for a walk around the block to check that the hot wire was working OK. As soon as we entered the block their was the new boar out on his own, I tried to approach him but he started growling at me so I kept my distance. I am looking forward to seeing how he fits in with the other pigs in the coming days.