Peter is a builder from Cromwell, he turned up with one eight month old dog, Gaz and a bitch that was over one year old, Jade. Because Jade was the older of the two and looked to be the harder we took her up for the first run. As soon as she saw the pigs she wanted to get into them so we had to hold her back for a while. When we thought that she had settled down enough we let her of the rope, not long after this she got to close to the main boar and was not quick enough to get out of his way.
She ended up with a small skin rip in her side which gave her a bit of a fright. After this she showed a lot more respect to the pigs. For our next run we took Gaz and Lightning. Gaz being only eight months was very stand offish and we had trouble getting her to show an interest in the pigs. after this run we had all night to talk about what our best option was for the morning. The two options I was thinking of was taking two of my dogs with Gaz to get the pigs a bit more worked up hoping that she would start to show an interest. By the morning we decided on the second option
taking both of Peter’s dogs with one of mine. We were both surprised when we got the dogs onto the pigs as Gaz was doing a lot more barking than Jade. As the day went on Gaz kept improving. When one of the boars would break down through the trees Gaz would stick with it and bail with one of my dogs but just would not stay for more than a couple of minutes. Jade would start chasing but come back to us far to early. When we stood beside the bailed pig Jade would bark but she was still a bit cautious as she did not want to get in to close again. Both dogs spent a lot of time on the pigs and I did notice a marked improvement from when they arrived to the time they left.