Using bulls to catch boars

First published on the Boar Catchers site

A TRIP north after boars introduced me to an entirely new way of hunting, using bulls to catch boars.

I'd caught pigs off carcases before but it was a hit and miss type of thing. Always worth checking a body in the bush because it might hold pigs...But this was different. It was a specific tactic to attract big toothy boars out of their hiding spots into a GPSed area.

Brett had developed the method on this particular block because dead cattle had proven his best producer of good boars. So after years of leg work he had started specifically hunting scrub bulls (to help reduce the feral cattle population for the landholder and...) to draw out the best boars.

My son Paul and I were lucky enough to see the system in practice, first hand.

It all starts immediately after the basic camp is set up. Straight out on the track to look for likely bull areas. The idea is to get the bulls on the ground as quickly as possible to give them time to 'ripen'. That took about five days in the climate we were in.

After the bulls are shot, near water, near a track somewhere reasonably accessible on foot, it is checked every day for tracks and it's state of decomposition. In this spot the pigs seems to have had little to do with people and scent does not seem an issue. Each day the bull changes and so do the tracks. After they've blown up and started to deflate, a dingo would usually open them up properly. The hide seems too thick for boars to open on their own.

Once the bull is open, the boars drag out pieces of meat and toss them up before appearing to swallow them like an oyster. (We know this because we also had a trail cam set up on different baits every few days.)

Just before the big gorge begins, you could expect one boar and sometimes two, to move in to claim the feast.

We'd arrive at night and check the baits, fresh tracks might tells us one was close by. Sometimes there was no sign at all but often they dogs would drop their nose to the ground or stick it up in the air and run straight onto a tusky pig.

The drill was always the same; load up the selected dogs and plate them up (put on their protective breastplates). Check our tracking gear had plenty of battery strength, same with torches and cameras. Throw plenty of food, water, go fast drinks such as V or Mother and first aid gear on board.

Drive to within a km of the bait (sometimes a lot closer if the bait had been well placed), unload the dogs and walk in. We'd have two definite luggers and two trainees. We also had one veteran finder out of the two luggers as well. The objective was to leave enough opening for a younger dog to step up in performance but not so much of a gap that we risked losing a good boar.

If we made it to the bull without the dogs hitting a boar we'd look at the body, check for signs of boar activity and wait while the dogs continued to scout about. While the bull was approaching the prime rotting time the boars seemed to be closer in but after the feeding had begun the average distance from the body increased.

Mostly, if it was on, it was on from the word go. The dogs would head to the bait more agitated than normal. They'd either pounce immediately on a boar within metres of the bait or start zig zagging through the grass or running in big circles. The zig zags would turn into a big arcing run straight to the pig. And the circles either sent a dog off at a straight line tangent to land on the pig or the circles got tighter and tighter and ended up with a boar in the bullseye. It was wild, knowing it was all about to happen but not surte just where, maybe right at your feet...

It was always at night time and it was always quiet, just the dogs getting through the scrub. Really straining your ears to hear the first sound of the dogs hitting a camped boar, full of anticipation. Then the sound and you're full of adrenalin, running through long grass and scrub to get to the fight. You can see the tusks on these pigs from a good way out in the light of the headlamps. You can see them banging into the dogs' breastplates and, sometimes, the dogs.

You know they will whack them into you if you give the pig the chance too.

It is a high risk, high yield way to hunt and it gets results.

I say high risk for a few reasons, one is the country we were in, scrub bulls and crocs for a start, the second is loading the dog's up on boar after boar especially if those boars are meat eaters. The risk of dogs getting cut up and the potential for significant infection was high.

And the risk of treading on some of these boars was just as real. We didn't know where they'd be and they weren't the type of pigs to yield ground. Some were caught within metres of us in the long grass, just standing there...

However, the inherent dangers for dogs and hunters with this type of hunting also creates a testing ground for the younger dogs. You can't make a dog want to grab a nasty boar. They either want to do it or they don't. You find out very quickly with this type of hunting whether or not your young dogs have the heart for the trade.

The green dogs in this hunting team did the job. That was expected of course. It wasn't a random collection of dogs but a team of younger or inexperienced dogs bred for the job. It was a matter of putting the work in front of them to see how they would react. And this was an A grade way to do that.

The whole thing was well planned and well executed and a credit to Brett's research on the pigs that live along Secret Creek.

Pig stats for the trip: 28 pigs in total, only five sows, of the 23 remaining boars 16 were crackers.)