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spanish america  Animal  Marcy Norton Afull kennel—twenty hunting dogs— climbed aboard the fleet that sailed on Christopher Columbus’s second expedition in 1493.1 Hunting, among the earliest exports, wrought changes and was changed in the colonial context, a consequence of its indispensability in conquest, the presence of novel fauna, and exposure to Amerindians’ methods and beliefs about hunting.The native fauna was viewed through the prism of hunting.The chronicler Gonzalo Fern ández de Oviedo wrote of deer: “There are many deer in Tierra Firme, neither more or less than there are in Spain in color and size, but not as fleet.To which I can testify because I have tracked and killed them with dogs in these parts several times, and also I have killed them with cross-­ bows.” Similarly, the eighteenth-­ century missionary José Gumilla discussed the hunting practices of indigenous groups in the Orinoco basin who captured peccaries, jaguars, armadillos, and monkeys.2 In the Americas, old techniques were used to hunt new animals.Colonists deployed sabuesos (hounds) which “run around [the jaguar], barking and nipping at him, and running away, and in this way annoy him.” European techniques of hunting fierce and self-­ defending animals were applied to the apex predators of Central America. Smaller, gentler, flight-­ prone prey, such as the hutía, a rodent, were hunted like rabbits and hares. Other native animals of the Caribbean and Central America hunted with dogs were deer, tapirs, anteaters, and peccaries. Skunks proved difficult quarry with these methods; the “few times [the dogs] kill it,” Oviedo wrote, “in overtaking or touching him, [the skunk] emits a stench so great and in such a way that the dog in an instant distances itself from it, and remains stupefied , horrified, and afraid, and very unhappy looking at it.” European hunting had profound ecological consequences in the Caribbean. By the time Oviedo arrived on Hispaniola in the 1520s, several species of rodents had completely disappeared, in large part because of hungry conquistadores and their dogs.3 Europeans and Indians appreciated each other as hunters, leading to mutual appraisals and borrowings of technique and strategy. Oviedo wrote appreciatively of indigenous hunting and fishing techniques, as did Gonzalo Argotede Molina in a treatiseotherwisedevoted to Iberian hunting. Molina described the drive hunts, in “which a grandíssimo number of Indians” gathered to rush and slay vicuña and guanaco in Peru, and the hunting of jaguars in New Spain.4 The European/Iberian connection between hunting animals and attacking people in warfare existed for many native peoples as well, not least in terms of techniques (shooting arrows, setting traps in the ground). On balance, however, the colonizers’ identification with indigenous hunting regimes did not lead to peaceful cross-­ cultural cooperation. The pervasiveness of hunting as an activity might help explain a horrifying phenomenon of obscure origins: the deployment of “war dogs” in the subjugation campaigns waged against the indigenous humans of the Americas (as in the Reconquista but to a much greater extent). (Dogs were recorded attacking native peoples in Jamaica first in May 1494, subsequently in the Hispaniola pacification campaigns in 1495, and then in campaigns throughout the sixteenth century.)5 Oviedo elevated the war dogs (with horses) above other creatures, including many humans, reflecting their status as “vassal animals”: like their European counterparts, they were compensated with booty after the hunt. Chroniclers memorialized dog warriors, such as Leoncico, who “distinguished between the enemy and friendly Indian as well as I.” Bartolom é de Las Casas explained thedeployment ofwardogs as a consequence of a tragic convergence of Indian nakedness and canine hunger: “Because all of the people of this island had the custom of going about completely naked, it can be easily seen that this and such effects could make the greyhounds ferocíssimos, provoked and compelled by naked and delicate bodies,” even more than by the hardened boars and venison that enticed them during hunting expeditions in Europe. Even while giving full vent to the horror of people-­ destroying dogs, Las Casas understood the phenomenon within a “hunting” paradigm, like his ideological foe Oviedo.6 Horses were also indispensable for conquest, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo described the appearance and personality of the horses who participated in Hernán Cort és’s campaign in Mexico. It is well known that livestock husbandry played a significant role in colonial enterprises in the Americas. For Christopher Columbus the absence of livestock animals was worthy of note: “I saw neither sheep nor...

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