When we drive down the road pig hunters wagons tend to stand out. The typical 4wd with a dog box on the back. These range from late model trucks with nice flash alloy dog boxes to rattly old trucks with the old plywood dog box on the back. When I started hunting I had an old Mitsubishi L200 2wd ute with an inadequate dog box on the back. Over the years I have had a number of plywood dog boxes that would keep me busy repairing them as they tend to fall apart over time. At one stage I had a dog box that was falling apart, when another hunter saw my predicament, he offered me a spare dog box that he was not using, for free. This box served me well up until the time that I designed and built myself a dog box that fitted on the back of my double cab Hilux. It was made so that I could ride my four wheeler up onto the back of the truck and have the box in behind so I did not need to tow a trailer for the motor bike. Because this box was better than the one that I had been giving for free, the free one became redundant. That was until one day when the worker on the farm next door stopped in and asked if I would sell him the box that I was not using. I said I would not sell it to him as it had been giving to me for free but he could have it for free if he wanted it. That was eight years ago and I still see him driving around with that box on the back of his ute.
Currently my ute has an aluminium dog box with two plywood sheets to separate the different compartments. When we are designing a new dog box there are certain requirements that we should be looking at. Of course they need it to be secure so that our dogs can not get out when we are driving down the road. Just recently I heard of a chap that got to his destination to find the door of the dog box open and one dog missing. Lucky for him, he had a collar on the dog with a registration tag attached. He was contacted by the council two days later saying his dog was found by a farmer. For this chap, he was lucky that things turned out ok as that is not always the case. Two horror stories that I know of are. One guy left his dog in his car over night and the dog stood on his spotlight and turned it on. This guy woke up to fire engines outside, with his car on fire. The dog did not survive. Another hunter had his two dogs in the boot of his car. Because he was worried about his dogs not having enough air he jacked it up so that his boot was open a couple of inches to let the air flow through. When he reached his destination he found both dogs dead. The fumes from his vehicle had been sucked into the boot which gassed the two dogs. Lets hope this never happens to you.
Having a box that can be locked up can be an advantage so that no one can let your dogs out without you knowing about it. The next thing I feel is very important is always have an old bit of carpet in your dog box or an old shirt or anything that the dog travels with so that the dogs scent is on that item. If at the end of the day you get back to your truck minus your dog you wont need to leave your $400 jacket on the ground for your dog to find instead you can leave the old bit of carpet there. This way when your dog returns he will stay with that piece of carpet until you return. However if your dog turns up somewhere else miles away you don’t need to panic about returning just for an old piece of carpet. If you find yourself in this situation put some thought into where you leave that piece of carpet don’t leave it out in an exposed spot where the dog will freeze if he stays with it, but find a nice sheltered spot out of the elements. As long as it is not to far from where your truck was parked your dog will smell it.
One of the most important requirements when making your dog box should be the height from the floor to the roof inside of the box. The reason for this is to minimize any dog fighting in the box. For the people that don’t understand how the height of your box can stop dogs fighting I will explain. When two dogs fight both dogs will start with there hackles up standing as tall as they can, as they attack each other. The winning dog will end up on top and the losing dog will end up laying on the ground in a submissive position. So now that we know how dogs fight where a problem can start is when our top dog is a big dog and the second dog in the pecking order is a shorter dog. What happens when we put these two dogs together in a dog box the tall dog has to duck down into the submissive position while the shorter dog can stand up with his hackles up and its all on.
I was at a hunting competition a couple of years ago when a ute out in front of the pub was rocking with the dogs in the back doing there best to kill each other. There would have been 600 people there but not one person crossed that road to try and stop the fight. Even with the best designed dog boxes we still hear about dogs fighting in them and this comes down to the environment that they are raised in.
While the height of the box will fix a lot of the problems it still does not fix the human factor. People who are good with dogs don’t have a problem with dogs fighting yet people who can not communicate properly with their dogs have the problems. Its like having a work force where they do not respect their employer. With your dogs you are the employer and your dogs are the workers so you need to communicate properly with them so they know what it is you expect from them. When I am away from home I regularly have four dogs in my dog box together and I can also feed them all together and they will not try and steal from another dog and they do not even growl at each other as they know that I will step in and sort out any bad behavior before it inflames. Where some problems can start is by mixing different dog together that are not used to each other. If you are a hunter who hunts with many different hunters and dogs then it is good to have a box with two dog compartments to keep dogs separated. Strange dogs do tend to get grumpy with each other when put into a confined dog box, however those same dogs at the end of a days hunting will jump in together without any problems. For any hunter that has a dog that gets aggressive with other dogs in a dog box or anywhere else you have got to understand that the dog is like that because you have allowed the dog to act that way whether by what you have done or what you have not done. The best time to sort out a problem with any dog is when they are young and wanting to learn. This is also the best time for a hunter to also learn from that dog before it grows up and becomes set in its ways which makes it harder to change their way of thinking. This comes back to the old saying (its hard to teach an old dog new tricks). In my earlier days of hunting I acquired a 15 month old bull terrier / collie (Punch). As soon as this dog was introduced to my dogs he wanted to fight. Straight away I got involved by grabbing him by the ear and dragging him back to his kennel and that was where he stayed until the next day. At night he got to watch the other dogs get fed but he went without. Next day when this dog was let out he was straight back in for a fight so again he was dragged back to his kennel and again he got to watch the other dogs get feed that night while he again missed out. This went on for three days and on the forth day he was probably too hungry to worry about fighting and he settled down. So over those first four days that dog had worked out that I was the boss and his behavior had to change. To do this I had not beat the dog any more than just twisting his ear and by working through his stomach I had got into his head so now I could do something with that dog. Dogs and people are no different in the way that we learn. If someone does not want to listen to you then you will not teach them anything. This was the dog that taught me about the importance of height of the dog box. He was a second dog and Leroy being a bigger dog was my main dog, as soon as Leroy crouched down to get into the box, Punch would try and start a fight with him.
For those people that think there dog should be able to stand up and walk around while they are traveling. When we travel we do not stand up and walk around we sit in our seat with our seat belt on.
Next thing with our dog box, we want somewhere that we can put our pigs. Some pig hunters like to have their pigs hidden so people can not see what they are up to whereas other pig hunters like to show their pigs off. This story was told to me by a fellow hunter from Dunedin when he was in his teenage years. He and his mates where returning from a successful hunt with three pigs sitting on the bonnet of their Valiant car. As they drove down the main street of Mosgiel at 7pm on a busy Friday night the newly erected traffic lights turned red and he had to hit the brakes. There three pigs ended up in the middle of the intersection much to the amusement of the public. Moral of this story secure your pigs on properly.
Some dog boxes are designed with a compartment for the hunter to store some gear which is a good idea especially if you have a single cab ute.
Each dog box should be designed to suit each hunter, because I have some land I sometimes need to move stock around on my ute so my dog box has been designed so that I can take the middle sheet of plywood out and leave the top sheet in so that I can move sheep or pigs around. If I have got the dogs and a heavy load I can take the top piece of plywood out and put it on top of the middle piece so that it can hold more weight. Otherwise I can leave both sheets of ply in and have the dogs on the bottom and store some gear above them. My last option is I can take out both sheets of ply so that people can stand up in the back and go night shooting, this way the crate around the shooters comes up to there waist so they are not going to fall off.
There is one fault with the design of this box though and that is the sides of the dog compartment are a little high so that when it rains the water runs in through the sides so I can not park the ute facing down hill or the back will fill up with water. With the ute facing up hill any rain that does get in runs straight down the back and out the tail door.
It is not just with our dog box that we cart our dogs around. I do a lot of hunting on a 4 wheeler and each dog always gets up the same way, on the same side every time even if they have to push
through some scrub to get on that side of the bike. Breeze and Cloud both get up on the right side of the bike and Lightning gets up on the left. Breeze lies down behind me, Cloud stands to my left with his head up by mine and Lightning stands to my right. Both dogs air scent so I can hear when they smell a pig and they are long range finders. When hunting on a bike you are giving away any surprise advantage that you might have had so any pig is going to be heading out of a gully as soon as they hear the bike so my dogs need to travel a long way to catch up to them.
On the 20 of January 2011 I left my hut at 5 am with the three dogs on the bike. I had only been riding 2 km when Cloud and Lightning jumped off the bike and took off up the hill, into the pines. This was the start of the dogs tracking this boar for thirty minutes. When they finally caught up with him I could tell by looking on the GPS that they had the pig bailed on the 4wd track 860 meters away around the gully. As I came around the corner on the four wheeler I could see the boar backed up to the bank with the dogs bailing so I parked up and grabbed my rifle. As soon as I started walking towards the pig he charged through the dogs and came straight at me. I could not shoot at him as the dogs where right behind him and the shot would have been far to risky so I waited until he was just about on me then I did a side step that would have impressed Graham Henry. I lowered the rifle to almost touch the boar as I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit the him in the front shoulder and he took another four or five steps before he faulted and came to rest right beside my motorbike. This was one of those dream hunts where I did not have to carry the boar at all and I was back at the hut by 6.20am with a 163 pound boar.