Snow is growing up so fast at present in both his body and mind. I am seeing some very impressive results coming from him already. He is about 21 weeks old now and from 18 weeks on I have noticed a huge desire to want to learn things. He had gone from a puppy playing with other dogs to a dog that wants to stop any other dog from walking anywhere, he knows not to bite any other dog but he can be such a persistent little bugger that he stops dogs. This in itself could have an adverse reaction causing my other dogs not to want to hunt, so I can see that in the next couple of weeks I will have to stop Snow from bailing the other dogs. This is not hard to do as I like to have good control over all of my dogs. The reason that I am not correcting Snow’s behaviour know is because it is the exact behaviour that I want to see him possess, all I need to do in the meantime is change Snow’s concentration over from the dogs to the pigs. This is not taking very long at all. Yesterday I had Snow in the main block with Lightning a training dog Indy and her owner Hamish Wells and the three dogs where on my grey boar Boris for a good half hour. Snow was quite happy getting into Boris’s face and he was loving every minute of it.
Because of Snow’s willingness to want to learn it is so easy to spend time with him so that he gets a chance to read my body language and understand some of the words that I say. This is the biggest stage of change that all animal owners need to understand, if your dog is not doing what you want it to then you have not known the things that you needed to know about helping that pup to understand things. People don’t know what they don’t know. Here to me is one of the simplest mistakes that I see a lot of people making with their dog. That is telling a dog to do something a lot of the time and expecting the dog to do that command and not giving the dog time to think. We also see this same mistake made with parenting when a parent tells their child to do something a few times when they would have heard them the first time. I have been allowing Snow to come though the fence to spend time with me around the house. He knows that none of the other dogs come through the fence unless asked to. When I feed the pigs I like to have Snow with me as I believe that it helps him to understand how another animal acts and reacts under normal daily life. Most dogs and hunters only get to see pigs under a stressful time. While I feed the pigs I also talk to them and give them a rub on the back, this way they too are calm and relaxed. If I can give off calm energy then everything else stay’s calm. At this point in time Snow is not too sure if he should bark at the pigs on his own or if he is only allowed to when the other dogs are with him. I am just waiting to see when he makes his decision to bark and at which pig. This I think will happen in the next few days. When I have finished feeding the pigs I walk back up to the house and if I am going to go inside I turn to Snow and say (down the back Snow). I do not keep repeating this command unless he either has not heard me or has been standing looking at me for the past two minutes then I would repeat the command in a serious tone. Today I walked up to the house and said in a nice tone of voice (good boy Snow, down the back) and had great pleasure to watch him happily walk around to the gate and get straight under) as he stood up on the other side I just reinforced the praise by saying good boy Snow in a nice calm happy voice. I know that he will stay down the back with the other dogs until I go back outside again.