Meet the victims:
VICTIM ONE: Beautiful pigs like Crunchie and Kit-Kat and used for training dogs for pig hunting. Dogs that are trained to hunt pigs living free in nature are familiarized with domestic pigs to start with, and these pigs will be approximately the same size or a little smaller than the dogs. One step used in training a dog.
- Present a pig on the other side of an enclosure, or in a cage. Tease your dog and work them up to getting excited about the pig. Repeat daily for a few weeks.
The poor pigs are tortured for weeks. The methods used to train dogs is inhumane, including setting dogs onto confined pigs that have been captured specifically for this purpose.
VICTIM TWO: Using dogs in pig hunting like Benji and Scruffy causes significant risks to both the pig being hunted and the dogs involved. In NSW, dogs are permitted to be used for ‘locating, holding or bailing pigs’. The holding (or lugging) of pigs is likely to result in higher levels of injury and distress to the pig and also cause more injuries to the dogs. Dogs often suffer from severe injuries and do not receive prompt or adequate veterinary help. More than people will be told, wounds sustained by dogs will be fatal. Veterinarians working in areas where pig hunters are active attest to the number of dogs who are presented for treatment: this number is likely to represent only a proportion of dogs actually injured.
Victim Three: Hunting pigs like beautiful Fabian with dogs involves the dog flushing out the pig and chasing it until it is exhausted or cornered. When the pig has been ‘bailed up’ the pig remains stationary facing the dog. The hunter moves in to either shoot the pig at close range with a firearm or kill it by stabbing in the heart with a knife, this is called ‘sticking’. Hunting of pigs with dogs is inherently cruel and unnecessary. If the hunter plans to stick the pig rather than shoot it, dogs are used to hold (or ‘lug’) the pig by the ears while it is being stabbed. Sticking a pig to kill it is inhumane because it does not cause instantaneous death: it takes some time for the pig to lose consciousness from lack of oxygen to the brain following destruction of the heart.
Although pig hunters vehemently defend their “SPORT” and believe they can lie to the public, thinking they will believe that their dogs do not maul or attack pigs and their dogs do not get injured as they will claim that the protective chest plates and collars prevent this, there is plenty of video, photographic and direct evidence that reveals the “TRUE” nature of pig hunting.
There is no substantiated evidence that recreational hunting of pigs with dogs is an effective method of managing pig populations
