Over the past six months I have been able to watch how Woof has developed.
As I mentioned earlier my grandson Aaron gave Woof his name and it has turned out very appropriate as his breeding is Beardie collie throwing to the huntaway side, he loves to bark. This can be a problem as a lot of hunters will know that having a trail barker in your team costs a lot of pork as not many pigs will stop when they hear a dog barking madly running towards them. Over the years I have been asked on numerous occasions how to stop a dog from trail barking and it’s a very hard question to answer as dogs are all different, what can work for one dog may not work for another dog. For Woof he just naturally wants to bark so to stop him from trail barking I need to keep him calm. As soon as something becomes exciting he wants to bark. To train a dog to stay calm comes down to energy. We know that old people generally have calm dogs because they are calmer whereas teenagers tend to have hyperactive dogs because they are full on. I can see with Woof that he has plenty of go in him so I want to be able to control when he gets excited and when he stays calm. A simple peice of training can be when putting collars on the dogs. Woof gets to see how all of the other dogs have to be calm when I put their collars on. So at the early stages when Woof was jumping around and not listening I would just stop and wait for him to calm down. Then when I go to put the collar on him as he needs to stay calm, if he doesn’t and continues jumping around I just wait patiently. It does not take a dog long to see how the other dogs are acting to settle down themselves. When Woof comes up to me he is normally bouncing around unless I have his collar as he has now learnt that sometimes he needs to slow down.
I have not spent a lot of time with a sit and stay command. However when I go through a gateway Woof knows exactly what to do also if I’m about to take the four wheeler Woof knows how to jump up. The most important command that I have trained Woof is the stop command. If Woof is working the chickens, the sheep or bailing a pig I can give him one whistle and he will return to me. I believe this to be the most important command to teach any dog because if they are doing something wrong you can stop them in an instant and dogs are quick learners.
Every situation that happens with Woof is an opportunity to learn, either a good thing or a bad thing. If I can stop the bad things calmly then the dog will still fell confident to carry on. How we act around our dogs has a huge impact on how our dogs turn out. Every action that our dog gets themselves into gives us the opportunity to react, and our reactions can dictate the outcome of a situation. If we react negatively we can end up with a negative outcome, but if we act positively we may end up with a positive outcome. Whenever Woof is doing something that I consider to be bad I can change his behavior with a whistle then put him in the situation that I want him to learn in. I want Woof to do more than just hunt pigs, I also want him to work my sheep. Because he is a working dog breed I can get him to work for me on different animals. For a pig dog with hard breeding this is obviously not the way to train those dogs. Some people think that you only train your dogs on pigs and nothing else. While this is one way of training your pig dog there are also other ways. A farmer doesn’t swap his dogs when working sheep or cows.
For me I believe that the more jobs a dog can perform the more the dog thinks about what it is doing and also gets to spend more time with the boss. Woof gets to bail my chickens most days, he just loves keeping them round up together. If one chicken tries to make a break he quickly cuts it off and puts it back with the other chickens. I also have turkeys which he will round up.
With the sheep he tends to want to go around them and bring them back towards me. All of these traits will help him to learn to work the pigs rather than attack them. For any good finder they should know that how they approach a pig has a big outcome of what’s about to happen.
Woof and Bro after another successful hunt.
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