COMMENTARY TO PERROS DE PRESA CANARIOS


   Perros de presas canarios was  published as it was written, the 23  May  1982 in the newspaper El Día, of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and in the month of February 1983 appeared published, summarized, in the magazine El Mundo del Perro (Madrid), under the title: A PRODUCT OF THE FIGHTS: PERRO DE PRESA CANARIO.
   In those days few, very few, were the fans of the Presa Canario, and very little, practically nothing, was known of them and their origin. And hardly they existed Presas Canarios worthy of such name, that is the truth and not another one. The immense majority of the present fans does not remember at least how they were those dogs, and a good part of they have not seen them in his life. Many had not been born. I am speaking of the true Presas Canarios dogs, that yes existed. To tell the truth (we are going to be honest) nobody knows when the Presa Canario dog was extinguished. It disappeared at the end of the last century, at the beginning of the present one? Nobody knows.

 In 1982-83 the fan of the canary dogs nothing knew about the Agreements of the Cabildo(Town council) of Fuerteventura and Tenerife, nothing of Decrees of Tenerife. And if somebody knew of them very little avail took, and who used them to study the canary dogs and their origin distorted of such way those data that more than to throw light on a subject so little investigated, excessively confused it with their eagerness to want to demonstrate the indemonstrable, and this is that the perros de ganado majoreros, the dogs of presa and the podencos (greyhounds) descend from the dogs that raised the natives before the conquest and colonization of these islands.
   In those years 1982-83, nothing I knew about the Agreements of the Cabildo of Tenerife and Fuerteventura, nor of Decrees of Tenerife, I must confess it. And little knew one of Jean de Bethencourt and Gadifer de La Salle. If I had known those texts I would not written the PERROS DE PRESA CANARIOS, or had written something different, with more historical base, and I had not referred the English and his dogs of fight, that is sure. Certainly I did not affirm anything in my work, that it only tried to be divulging, to wake up a liking. Simply I limited myself to write that the English, "that it seems were they who brought the liking of the dogs fights to the Canary Islands, is of supposing they would bring, their mastiffs, already famous in the combats in the times of Julio Caesar, rabid bullterriers, able those,in the past more than today, to fight with very superior dogs in size and overcome them,the bullmastiffs, bulldogs, etc."

Tenerife 1991