- Skull of aborigine dog, with mummified remains, cream-coloured hair, photographed in the Tenerife Archeological Museum. As with the previous one, it is no longer than 10 cm.
The Presa Canario Dog: It's true origin Manuel Curtó Gracia La Laguna - Tenerife 1991
Apparently, in Lanzarote, in Fuerteventura, La Palma, La Gomera, and El Hierro, have not been found canine rest pertaining to times previous to the conquest, nor is spoken either of which there were dogs in those islands when arrived to it coasts (1402) Jean de Bethencourt and Gadifer de La Salle with all their troops.
In the book Le Canarien, edition 1980, translated and commented by Alejandro Cioranescu, page. 64, version G (Gadifer), talking about Gran Canaria, we read: "they are well providing with animals: pigs, goats and ewes, and wild dogs that seem wolves, but smaller". We read in the same book, version B (Bethencourt), pages 165-166: “they are well providing with animals: pigs, goats and ewes, and wild dogs that seem wolves, but are small". In the first text says that they are smaller, in the second one that are small, that mean, that was neither large nor medium sized. And in both cases says wild dogs, and, it does not seem me possible that the inhabitants of Gran Canaria let roam by the island to any dog that could attack the cattle.
In addition, it is impossible that in that island, just like in Tenerife, were wild dogs, in any case untamed and even so the reality do not change. The dog, domestic animal, only in very special circumstances live separate of the man.
Known is that the canary natives practiced a very elementary agriculture, and still being very elementary they eliminated of their cultivation and pastures all those grass that were not good for the cattle. With the same criterion they would eliminate, I want to suppose, in the islands in were be them, to those dogs that escaped to their control putting in danger the integrity of their nutritional base, that mean: the goats, the ewes, and the pigs.
Therefore, the dogs in both islands were small and of similar characteristics.
Fray Alonso de Espinoza, in his book “Historia de Nuestra Señora de Candelaria”, page 114, talking about the dogs that ate the human corpses that had been in the battlefield after the slaughter of Acentejo, he say: "These dogs were small zatos or gozques to which they called Canchas, that the natural ones raised, and due the disease they neglected to give them to eat -the author talks about the plague that was propagated as a result of the many human corpses that were scattered by the field after the confrontations between Guanches and Spaniards-, finding meat of died bodies, they became so fierce that they attacked to the alive ones and they finished them, and thus the natural ones, find as remedy of their misfortune, to sleep over the trees when they walked by fear of the dogs".
And we do not have more references about dogs into the hands of the canary natives.
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