First time in the Saugatter

Even though the spring weather has turned from warm and sunny to gloomy and rainy, training never stops. Yesterday Baxter went to his first clicker class even though it was quite cold and rainy. I think that this may be the magic trick to getting him to walk normally on a leash. It is really amazing, he walks nicely on the show line now, but goes like a bat out of hell on the normal line. Time will tell.

In other news, we ventured to France today to try our luck in the Saugatter. It was a 27 hectare fenced in area (roughly 67 acres) contain 2 boars ranging from 30-60 kg (65-130 lbs). The area was roughly 1/2 covered in brush and forest area and 1/2 field, but the forest wasn't continuous so there were a lot of places for the boars to hide. Our group was made up of 6 dackels and 1 Bavarian Mountain Bloodhound and 2-3 dogs were out searching at one time. We followed the dogs, with large sticks in hand, through the whole area, up and down steep, slippery, muddy hills for about 1.5-2 hours, but alas, we did not find the boars. Maybe we were lucky. The first group of the day did find the smaller of the 2 boars and it didn't end too well. The boar decided to run at the dog and handler instead of turning and running. Luckily no one was too hurt. The dog had a minor injury on its foot, which needed to be looked at and bandaged and the handler had to get 3 stitches to close up a cut on her shin. Nonetheless, this really illustrates the real dangers of hunting for these animals. The boars we were working with were relatively small and tame. If it were bigger it could have done quite a bit of damage.

We decided to only go out into the enclosure with Freddie, since he is older, more experienced and has better obedience and recall in case we needed to quickly get him out of the situation. He did really well in searching the forest on his own without going too far. It was good practice for a potential future Stöber exam. Only one dog let out any indication that he had found something, but it was really short. A few barks and that is it. Ideally, the dog should work the boar, alerting it's owner as to where the animal is and keep it from going too far. I think this was a great place to practice, but too big for the inexperienced dogs in our group. Later this year, there will be the possibility for going to a 2 hectare (5 acre) saugatter and I think we will try our luck there. For now we are all quite tired and I'm sure we'll all have sore muscles tomorrow. Til next time...