Baits bring in big boars

By Nathan Phillips

A Kiwi bloke named Graham and I were the final two hunters for last season with Matt Graham being my guide for the week and Graham being guided by Aussie larrikin, character and all around good guy Steve "I Like Guns" Lee. I couldn't have asked for better company for a week in the bush.


THE camp is on a working cattle property a couple of hours out of Katherine in Australia's Northern Territory and the accommodation is comfortable...tents with a large communal meals and kitchen area. Hot showers and flush toilet round out the amenities. My tent is on the right and Graham was in the one to the left in the photo below.

 

We arrived at camp mid afternoon and after a cuppa and a chat with Matt, we took a couple of rifles out to check zero. I brought two rifles with me; my old faithful Winchester M70 Classic Stainless .270Win with 150gn Norma ammo and my Sako Fibreclass 7mm Rem Mag. All good and back to camp for dinner and a catch up with Steve, who had been out dropping off a few baits he had shot.

Day 1 We were up before first light and off to stalk in on a bait in the pre-dawn gloom. As we got into range of the bait a very large boar had already winded us and was moving off heading toward the nearby creek offering no chance of a shot. We then decided to check out a couple of brumbies shot the week before in a different paddock. We stalked in from about 600m away and found a good boar was just moving off from the bait. Matt urged me to shoot him, but the extended range, nerves and not being able to get a clear shot between the trees and termite mounds caused me to hesitate. Matt suggested we get closer and I readily agreed. It turned out to be a good idea. When we got closer we saw that the boar was moving toward a mob of pigs further into the re-growth. We waited until he had joined them and then we moved in to about 80m away and studied them through the binos, finding not one but two good boars among the mob. I shot the two good boars and another two sows while the others just stood around watching.

 

We definitely could have cleaned everything up had we wanted to and I really don't think these pigs had ever been shot at before. We stood there for probably 10 minutes laughing at a young red boar take advantage of the fact I had just eliminated his competition for the young sow in heat that was with them. As soon as he was finished though, he wasted no time in hitting the afterburners,

I also got my first look at a buffalo bull when I heard sticks breaking above us and this fella came in to within about 50m while we were taking photos of my pigs.

The middle of the day was spent looking at baits to see what had been freshly fed on to establish a plan for the afternoon. We decided to take a couple of camp chairs and wait on a bait until after dark. It was well after dark before we heard a splash in the water beyond the bait. Half an hour later still nothing had appeared at the bait when I heard crunching footsteps in the dry grass behind us. I whispered to Matt, asking if he could hear that, and then a huge boar walked up beside us, casual as anything and stopped to look at us from a range of about 4 to 5m. After a minute or two he decided we weren't worth worrying about and continued on to the bait. Matt gave me the thumbs up so I stood and got ready to shoot. Matt flicked on his torch and I fired from a distance of about 12m or so. He was in long grass with only the top third of his body visible and I made the mistake of hitting him too high. He was, however, hit hard and stumbled a few metres to our left, then turned and came sort of towards us. I hit him a second time and he was down for good. He was a monster of a boar, well over 100kg but unfortunately bugger all in the tusk department. Unfortunately I didn't get a good photo of him due to the darkness.

Day 2 Up again before day light and off to check a couple of baits. The stalk in was ruined by a feral horse who kept running up ahead of us and spooking everything in sight. After finding nothing on the baits we decided we would go shoot the horse. Unfortunately by then he had run up into the trees behind a mob of buffalo and when the buff spooked, they took the horse with them. We spent the day exploring some new country, finding a very promising young buffalo bull in the process.

We also went for a walk along a creek high up on one of the jump-ups but didn't find anything other than an interesting little cave.

Back to the car and continuing on our journey, we came across a couple of really good scrub bulls. While looking at one of them a mob of six donkeys came into our sights. I anchored all six to the spot with single shots, but two of them needed a finisher. We dragged them together to create a new bait site with plans of visiting them on the last afternoon of my hunt. I didn't take too many pics of the donkeys, but here is one anyway...

And here is a nice young scrubber that caught my eye. He'll be a ripper in a few years.

We continued on and a few kilometres up the road we ran into another big mob of scrub cattle with a couple of good bulls among them. We also had a good laugh at one little rotund bull with stumpy legs bringing up the rear of the herd. Like the little fat kid who gets picked on in school by his bigger class mates... After they had moved off we continued another 100m or so and hit a fenceline, turned around to head back and just opposite where we stopped to look at the bulls was a mob of four donkeys. I rolled two of them and Matt said to leave the others We dragged the two donkeys together and made another bait site to visit on the last afternoon.

That afternoon Matt dropped me out to a tree stand overlooking a bait site to see what turned up for a feed. Unfortunately nothing showed and the day finished without another pig.

Day 3 Up before dawn for a quick breakast then out to stalk into another bait site or two. No pigs on either of them, but the pigs had been had been there through the night. We then checked out a swamp that Matt hadn't been to before. Leaving the vehicle and heading off on foot, we had only been there for about five minutes when Matt spotted a wild dog trotting along. He whistled to get the dog to stop while I leaned against a tree and shot her from about 80m.

While looking at the dog, a young buffalo bull decided he didn't like the fact that we were obviously in his territory and started moving towards us. He would come in a few steps, then run around to our right, then come in again, then run around to our right. Matt had said a couple of times "Geez this fella's a bit cheeky". It wasn't until he started undoing the velcro on the holster of his .44 Magnum hand cannon that I twigged to the fact that "Geez this fella's a bit cheeky" was actually code for "one tonne of buffalo is about to smear us into the dirt". Swinging the rifle off my shoulder and  disengaging the safety I caught myself wondering if a 150gn bullet from a .270Win up the nostril would do the job on a uff. Fortunately I didn't have to find out. Matt grabbed the dog and we beat a hasty retreat into the patch of thick scrub next to us & made a big arc back to the car. Tense stuff indeed. Pictured below is the trouble maker...

I went to a different tree stand that afternoon and once again nothing was happening with the pigs. They were proving very elusive. A big male dog came into the bait at about 8.50pm and had been there for about 10 minutes when I heard the vehicle coming to get me in the distance, so I flicked on the light and another wild dog was on the deck.

 

Having not seen hide nor hair of a pig for two days, Matt decided we'd go nocturnal and stalk in on a couple of baits after midnight. We got nowhere on the first bait with the ground being too dry and  the pair of us sounding like a herd of rampaging elephants trying to stalk in. The second site was a buffalo cow shot the week before. We could hear pigs fighting over the buff carcass, but the wind was all wrong to stalk in on and we eventually spooked them off. Back to camp empty handed and in bed just after 2am.

Day 4 Once again the pigs had beaten us in the morning. We stalked in on a couple of bait sites to find nothing in attendance, then walked for miles along a couple of creeks to no avail. On the way back to the vehicle we ran into three feral horses. As we were stalking up to them, they inexplicably ran off across the other side of one of the creeks. We stalked down to the waters edge and getting a rest off a convenient tree, dropped one with one shot from around 160m. Matt explained that the pigs like horse meat above all else so he would've liked to have dragged the horse back to the nearby bait site, but we couldn't find a way to get the vehicle across the creek, so it stayed where it was.

After our midnight raid the night before, it was time to hit the sack for a snooze. That afternoon I sat at another tree stand from about 5pm until around 9.30pm. Just before dark a big male dog came in to the edge of the bait and stood about 10m to my right sniffing the breeze before heading to the nearest carcass ready for a chew. His female companion, however, kept off the bait a distance of around 30m and circled around the bait site, stopping at the track Matt and I had walked in on for a sniff. The she was on to the tree behind me where Matt had stashed a camp chair cause the tree stand was a bit narrow for me. Both dogs moved off without feeding and returned three times in total, each time visiting the chair on the ground and leaving again without feeding.
About 9.20pm three pigs came in. I couldn't tell what they were in the dark, but could see two very large black shapes and could hear the third off to my right behind a low tree. Matt had told me that quite often the boars will hang back a little, then join in after they're satisfied everything is okay so I had convinced myself that the third pig I couldn't see was a boar. After 10 minutes or so I thought I saw the third pig in the clear so I flicked the light on in that direction. Turned out to be just the shadow of a termite mound, so swung the light back toward the bait. A large sow dropped to the shot and then I could hear the unseen pig off to my right take off through the grass back over my right shoulder. I couldn't swing the rifle around that far to the right due to the way I was seated in the tree stand and also the tree at my back, so flipped the rifle over & shot at the fleeing pig left handed. It was something I've never done before so had no idea how it was going to go. Dropped the pig on the first shot but it was squealing up a storm so hit it again. By that time the other pig was long gone, so got two of the three. They turned out to be two big old sows.

 

Day 5  Nothing at the baits we visited in the morning. I had been using the .270Win all week so asked Matt if I could take the Sako 7mm Rem Mag out and find a donkey to bowl over. He said sure and we ended up finding a mob of four horses. Six shots later all four horses were down. The first shot I took was a complete miss, not sure what happened, probably just hurried and jerked the trigger. Anyway, then three horses were anchored on the spot with only one needing a finisher, then the last shot was at the stallion, who ran off as if I had missed him. I reloaded and was following him through the scope when he keeled over, dead as a door nail. I didn't take any photos of them.

So the big plan had been put in place for the last afternoon of the hunt. We were off to visit the two  lots of donkeys I had shot on day two. When we got to the mob of six donkeys I had shot there were pigs already on the bait. As we tried to stalk up to them, three different lots of cattle spooked, running in every direction and spooking the pigs as they went. We left the bait undisturbed and headed to the second lot of two donkeys I had shot. We parked about 500m away and stalked in slowly.
As we neared the bait Matt spotted three large pigs about 300m away down on the creek flat. We continued on to the bait site and got comfortable on our camp chairs. While watching the three through the binos, one of them decided to take off for no apparent reason. One of the pigs still there was a very good boar so we thought we should go and get him before he decided to take off too. We hadn't gone 30m when he decided to head towards us to the bait. I leant against a tree and when he put his head down I shot above his head into his spine and  he dropped. He was on a game trail so we decided to leave him there until later, rather than scent up the track the game were using.
Back to our seats we went and out with the binos again. After a while I spotted a huge boar coming in from the scrub along the creek. I pointed him out to Matt and we watched him walk all the way up to his fallen mate. The big boar became jittery. We were discussing going for a stalk and getting him, when Matt noticed another big boar coming down the track we had driven in on. When the two boars met up near their fallen mate, they turned and headed towards the bait. We had already started stalking toward them and had to freeze where we were, about 8m from the bait. The boars were about 60-70m apart when the first one got to the bait. I had previously asked Matt which one I should shoot as I wasn't convinced I could get them both. He said I needed to shoot them both. No pressure of course...
I was trying to leave it as long as I could to allow the other boar to get as close as possible before I attempted the double. That decision was taken out of my hands when the first boar stood between the two donkeys looking at us from a distance of around 7m. With it being almost fully dark, I decided it was time. I raised the rifle and dropped the first boar with a head shot. I then swung onto the second boar and hit him hard with the second shot.  saw him hit the deck. He was up again in a flash and I hit him again. I turned my attention back to the first boar to make sure he was down and out as we were very close quarters, when Matt said the other one was up again. I took a few steps forward to the nearest tree, took a rest and put the boar down for keeps. He was by far the biggest of the three. The first two were well over 100kg and the third one had at least 20kg or more on them. Even though the first boar I shot on the first morning had the biggest tusks, these three were definitely the highlight of my week with Hunt Australia.
(Sorry for the quality photo but my camera packed it in on Day 3 so Matt and I only had our phones. You can see the big boy closest to me in the photo.)

On the way back to camp we stopped by my mob of six donkeys again, stalked in from 500m away and to within 60m or so. Matt flicked the torch on and we both thought nothing was there. Then there was a grunt and a small mob of pigs stood up from their slumber around the bait. I dropped two big sows from the mob and we called it a night.

I want to thank both Matt and Steve for their efforts. While Matt did the guiding for me, not to mention cooking, cleaning and tusk extraction for the camp, Steve and his Kiwi hunter Graham kept the baits stocked with fresh donkeys and horses. Unfortunately Steve "I Like Guns" Lee didn't have his guitar with him, but he kept us entertained with stories, jokes and card tricks. He made me promise not to Google them to see how they were done, because I would "lose respect for him as a magician". He's a funny man, and the whole trip was a blast.


Story first published on Australian Hunting Net
Reprinted with permission.
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Tom Varney: from wild man to wild dogs

Mountain boars are a breed apart...

By Mick Frost

WINTER is upon us again on the northern New England tablelands of New South Wales.
The first frost makes its presence known as the grass crunches underfoot. The moon is full and high in the night sky, illuminating the landscape in a silvery wash of light. The two dogs tremble and quiver, whining in delight. Their collars tight and the red light on the GPS unit flickers reassuringly.
The time of night, the season and state of the moon add a degree of anxiousness to a hunt like this.
Lone dominant boars use this time to range far and wide in their territories in pursuit of sows in oestrous.
It's well after midnight and the surrounding mountains well up on the horizon in the moonlight as I approach the hunting area. By daylight the range is a scattered mess of house size granite boulders, scarred in deep hidden gullies. The gullies are filled with blady grass, bracken fern and tea tree and somewhere in that thick mass of vegetation and eucalyptus a lone boar makes his home. Far away and independent of lesser pigs he uses the mountain as a safe haven. By day he camps at a certain level that affords him greatest safety, constantly sniffing and testing the rising thermals for any danger from below. Coming down for a short period at night to feed he melts back into the range at the first glow of light on the eastern horizon.
With winter his visits to the low lying flats become more numerous and of longer duration.
This is the time I like to target these big secretive mountain boars.
With the shorter days and plummeting temperatures the frosts burn off the more succulent summer grasses and food becomes more scarce. Big boars materialise out of the thickest scrub and bush land and offer dedicated hunters a chance at nailing them in the open where they are at their most vulnerable.

 The particular pig that I am targeting has made a mockery of numerous dogs over the past year.  The cocky has had crosshairs on him on the rare occasion he's spotted him but he is always on the move and gone before a shot can be fired in anger. From vague reports he's a typical high country pig, all black, a thick, dense wiry coat to fight the frosts and occasional snow falls. Often his whereabouts can be gauged; dogs flying off the ute and high tailing it up the mountain into the gorge only to be smashed in the tea tree or to lose him all together in the thick undergrowth circling round and round, back tracking on the GPS eventually coming up empty handed.
In conversation with the property owner he points to his jersey weaner and says "he'd be as big as Dulcey there". My heart skips a beat. He shows up sporadically through winter, but disappears into the mountain range with the spring rains and warmer temperatures.

Big pigs in these parts are almost exclusively nocturnal. Hunting pressure is high and pigs educated. The sounds of a ute travel far in the crisp dense mountain air. The inorganic groan of a diesel engine, the squeak of a cage, or the rattle of a chain mean only one thing to a mature boar that has survived several winters. Pure unadulterated danger. At the first sign of intrusion he will melt back into the shadows of the mountain and be enveloped in the mass of gully systems.

Of course these pigs can and are caught off the ute but a different tactic can be employed with these secretive mountain boars that will allow the dogs to nail them in the open. Walking in on known big pigs is a deadly tactic that pays quick dividends on hard hunted boars. Walking is especially effective once a big pigs habits have been "patterned". This patterning will be done during the day, keeping a note of where boar sign is sighted, travel directions, measuring foot size, what he is feeding on, where he is feeding and in the last few years the employment of game cameras. Many of these mountain pigs are non crop dependent meaning their movements seem slightly more erratic. Generally as they are far from any crop and are usually feeding on grass seeds, blackberries, grubs, tubers, roots and carrion. These food sources mean growth rates are slower and by the time a boar reaches the 120kg mark he has most likely come to an agreement with several dogs.

Walking is not for everyone, you must be fit and dedicated. A boar will often be missed time and again from the ute in rough country due to the headstart they can have on the dogs. Of course there will be blokes out there with super dogs that hit up big boars off the ute and never miss them and won't need to walk...
Dogs must be fast on scent, direct with their finding, very highly driven in the pursuit of their quarry and even better at honing in on and stopping a big boar. Add to that sometimes long periods of time with the boar because of the time it an take you to get there.
Hunting on foot puts you in touch with the wild life and landscape around you. You start to pick up on more sign  and get to know better where this sign will be found. For example: Tusks marks on trees, what sort  and size of tree to look for that boars prefer to use;. Pig tracks on pads, their size and where they are heading; Turned over logs and cow pats. All things that can be missed from the comfort of a ute.
Hunting at night on foot with the aid of moonlight on big 'patterned' boars adds a whole new dimension to some of the pigs you will come in contact with in regards to size and strike rate on finds for the dogs. The moonlight allows you to walk long distances without the aid of torch light, potentially alerting big flighty pigs of your presence.

With the ute in low range and lights out, it slowly groans down the side of the hill to where I will finally abandon it, step into the crisp air and begin my walk along the base of the mountains. Hunting boars in the mountains is more about the outsmarting of the animal. It is far separated from the pig chasing of the western downs and plains. Numbers fewer, more hunters for a given amount of pigs and a far more challenging environment combine to make it the ultimate challenge for man and dog.

Using the light of the moon I walk slowly, testing the direction of the wind, confirming that it is correct for the direction in which I will hunt. Without shining lights around I broach the side of a small stream that hugs the base of the mountain to the east. To the west the country opens up into creek flats interspersed with blackberries and rising into small hills and open eucalyptus bushland. Mob pigs often use the latter to live and feed. Big lone boars will often hang on the fringes of mobs, closest to the side of retreat hugging the edge of the mountains, and for this boar his escape route will always be to the west across the stream. With this in mind another way to try to single them out from the mob is to try to circle around known mob feeding areas and cut between them and their escape routes and picking loan boars of the fringes. Easier said then done.

I know where he has been crossing the stream, his tell tale hoofs leave an impression on the ground giving me a picture of how big he is. I've marked the spot on the GPS and am making a beeline to it hoping to pick up some ground scent on his pad. Being an animal of habit I know if he's crossed it will be at this particular place. Getting to within about 700m of the spot the dogs intensity starts to rise and a more serious demeanor can be read on their face. Their noses point towards the sky testing the slight breeze, getting fragments of that tell tale rank smell that floats on the frigid air. They canter off into the breeze with their noses high in the air. No ground scent yet, but a rank waft that ebbs and flows. On the GPS I trace there movements . They cut in a zig zag fashion. No doubt losing the scent on the breeze, then gaining it again as they work to a different position all the while working toward the target. With that their pace quickens and becomes more of a straight trajectory on the GPS as they vector in on a target. You hope dearly you won't hear a squeal. Standing there. Listening. Knowing. Your hair stands on end. You stand dead still straining to listen, hearing the pump of your own blood in your ears. The feeling is akin to throwing a surface lure into a deep dark mass of logs on sundown in some bass or cod river, knowing what's going to happen, but the explosion still surprises and scares you every time. With that my Bull Arab lets out a huge deep bark, closely followed by a massive exhalation of air and the unmistakeable roar from an enraged boar, then silence. He has been caught in the open, red handed with nowhere to run and must fight for his very existence. Getting to about 20m from the battle I turn off my headlamp and walk slowly in to better gauge the situation in the moonlight. The last thing you want is to become the attention of a 100kg pig that's just a little bit pissed off. Scarily old pigs know who and what poses the greatest danger to them, and it's not the dogs. The occasional yelp, grunt and growl is heard. Big pigs can and do break from even the strongest of luggers so I use the cover of a big tree and time my run from behind it to race out behind the pig and grab a leg as he spins wildly all the while violently thrusting his head up in the air.

A few pats and "good boy" to the two panting dogs, I check them over and find the pig was not the only one to pay a price tonight. The pigs fighting pads reach his hips and are an inch and a half thick where they hang down over the top of his front legs, like an armadillo. Sitting there, I stare at this animal, steam floating from his still body, I wonder what it is that draws me on such a deep level to find and catch this dangerous adversary. The thrill of the chase, the adrenaline of a big boar, or importantly being in the bush and doing something for the environment and landholders. But it's then that I look at my two dogs, staring back at me puffing, and I realise for me at least, it's about them. Working with them, experiencing the highs and lows of pig chasing with them, watching their development, conditioning and training them, having them put their lives on the line for me, experiencing their mateship, knowing they will push themselves to physical failure to please me and sometimes even feeling their heart beat for the last time laying in your arms.
All this from a few weeks of age until the day they die, working with ,and training a good dog is what makes this activity not just a sport or a hobby, but a religion that I live and breath 24/7.

Pro buffalo shooting: the way it was...

The Great Australian Buffalo Hunt

 

A 54 minute documentary put together in the 1980s about the pro meat market in the seventies. Take particular note of the stats...a new rifle every two weeks, a grown buff skinned, dressed and quartered every seven minutes and more...

 

 

 

With thanks to Neale for finding the footage.

Using game cameras to pattern big boars

 

A short film I made last year to show how I use game cameras to pattern big boars on one of my hunting blocks. It was all shot with a little digital camera and is unlikely to win any awards for camera work or editing but I hope it encourages hunters who aren't using game cameras to give them a try.

You can't spend all day and all night in the bush observing things but the game cameras can...

 

 

 

Getting your goat...two NSW public land hunt videos

Going public helps Mark add some free range meat to the freezer.

 

 

 

(For the best view hit the 'full screen' button on the lower right hand corner of the video box.)

The British view of Victorian and South Australian hunting

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.)