I first meet Simon many years ago when we were both members of the Taieri pig hunting club. Back then Simon was catching a lot of pigs. Now many years later and with a young family he is about to get back into the sport after a break. He came to me with one eighteen month old straight heading dog. Since I started using muzzles on the dogs in the training block Meg was to be the first dog that I have put into my block without a muzzle or rope.
When she was first introduced to the pigs she showed no interest in them and being a straight heading dog I felt that she would not try and go in and grab. Because she was so stand offish I was using two of my dogs, Lightning and Breeze and also getting them to break the pig to make it more exciting to try and encourage her to join in. By the end of the first run she would give a couple of barks from a distance.
For the second run we took just Fog and Meg. Fog bailed the main boar who we also had bailed on the first run but this time things were far more settled down as I only had the one dog bailing. It was good to see Simon getting right in behind Meg and encouraging her to get closer to the boar and do a bit more barking. I could see an improvement in her over the next hour as she got more confident as time went on. Where Meg’s big improvement came was over night she would have been sitting in her dog box thinking about what she had been doing and this would have been playing on her mind. Next morning she seemed like a different dog as she was keen to get in closer to the pigs and really put in a good effort. It even surprised me how big a circle she had turned in such a short time.
I was starting to face my own problems though as I was almost over working my own dogs as they had not had a rest off the pigs for a week. Normally I rotate my own dogs so that they can each get a rest but normally I only use Breeze, Lightning and Fog and now I could see that they could do with a days rest so I gave my rabbit/possum dog Jeff a run in the block as he also loves bailing the pigs but if their is a possum around that would be his first target. So with Jeff, Fog and Meg we went into the Block and bailed up one of the grey boars. This was when I got to see the huge advances that Meg had made over night as she was right in there and not standing back. On our last run we just took Fog and Meg and by the time we called her out after another hour of bailing she was ready for a break and I am certain that she would have slept well the next night as she would have had one of the most physical 24 hours in her life to this point.
Summing up I think that if Meg had just been taken out on the hill to try and get her started on pigs, she would have taken a very long time where as with the work that we had put into her over that 24 hours would have put her training almost one year ahead of where she could have been with out it.