A big part of training our pig dogs should be done at home so that by the time we take our young dog out for a hunt it is willing to listen to us. This piece of footage not only shows training the dogs to listen but also how to create a mental boundary rather than a physical boundary. I recently had a client who witnessed a dog crawling under the gate to get into my section. He said to me that I should either lower my gate or fill in the gap below it so that the dogs could not get through. This is the mentality that a lot of people use. If we think about people in town when their dog escapes from their section they look for the hole in the fence and fix that spot. Any dog that wants to escape will more than likely find another place to get out. Another side of this is that when the dog escapes the owner has to catch the dog to put them back. For a dog this is interaction and dogs are always seeking attention so the process just escalates.
I personally don’t like to use physical boundary’s as I prefer a psychological boundary. The paddock that my dog kennels are in is about eighty acres of scrub with no fences within that eighty acres so if the dogs wanted to go off wandering then they could do so. Because of the large boundary’s I have certain dogs that can not be let out of their kennels without a tracking collar on them. On one side of their block is the pig block and the dogs know that they are not allowed to enter this block without my permission even though they regularly listen to the boars fighting on a daily basis. On the other side of the block is bush and every now and then a wild pig may think that he can come into my gully for a feed. This is when my dogs are most likely to track off for the day, hence the need for tracking collars. Whenever I am at home for the day I like to leave the dogs off to run around and enjoy themselves. Quite regularly I will see them sleeping under the pine tree in the shade with half a dozen sheep.
To teach my dogs a mental boundary can be done in one of two ways. First when the dog comes through I can put the dog back while repeating the command down the back. If the dog should try and come back through then I have the electric collar. How the electrics are used depends on the dog and weather they already know what the collar can do. If the dog has had a shock from the collar previously then I should only need to push the button that makes a sound and at the same time I would reinforce with my voice in a serious tone, down the back. For most well mannered dogs they click on to this very quickly. Other not so well trained dogs that keep wanting to come through I can go and put them in a dog kennel and they soon realise that all of the other dogs are left to run around, this way I am working with their minds.
