Reon Hamilton was coming in for his 3rd visit with his hunting mate Richard Campbell. This was Richards 2nd time in. Reon had brought in four of his dogs Max is 3.5 years old, Patch 1 year old, Bo 16 months and Walt a 1 year old heading dog. Richard did not have any dogs as he uses Reon’s dogs when hunting. They also brought in another 3 dogs that belonged to a freind of theirs who had helped them a lot with their hunting so this was their way of saying thanks to John. John’s 3 dogs were Oscar 1 year old, Tig 2 year old and Gus 8 months old.
We took Max and Patch on 1st run with black boy and Black and white. Max is Reons main dog he was doing a really good job of keeping the two boars together without putting too much pressure on them.
After a while we took Patch out and added Bo. Bo is a very big powerful dog and is ideal on a big nasty boar but if he thinks he can get the upper hand he would rather hold that ear.
After a while at this bail we took Mack out and swapped him for Walt. With this combination because Bo was hard Walt wanted to also put pressure on the boar which had us moving around the block alot.
For our next run we put John’s 3 dogs in with Kevin Bacon.
For a start these dogs were unsure about Kevin but with a wee bit of time and encouragement we had the 3 bailing.
It did not take too long before they started putting on too much pressure which kept breaking Kevin so we took Gus out and swapped him for Mack for the next hour.
Oscar performed very well as he wanted to stick with the bail, Tig also bailed well.
Our next run was with Bo and Patch and once again it was Kevin that we found 1st. Bo started off really well but then just wanted to try and hold Kevin so we had to do a bit of work with him to try and wear him out but Bo is one tough dog.
Our next run was with John’s 3 dogs and they were egging each other on putting a lot of pressure on the bail so we removed Oscar and Gus and brought in Walt with Tig and this proved a good combination as they bailed well without to much pressure.
On our last run we took Walt and Patch and this also worked out a very good combination but the standout was definitely Walt as you could see the natural ability of the heading dog coming out in him.
He was ready for any move of the pig and not putting too much pressure on to break the bail.
It was a great two days of training that we had and both Reon and Richard went away with big smiles and high expectations of coming hunts with these dogs.