Mark Derr's A Dog's History of America (North Point Press: 2004; see Washington Post book review) offers a broad portrait of the use of war dogs in the Americas. According to Derry, the Conquistadors' dogs were "specifically bred and trained to hunt down and disembowel Indians," and they followed the "practice of bringing along on any campaign chained Indian slaves as food for the dogs."
From Pestilence and Genocide (excerpted from the book American Holocaust by David Stannard, Oxford University Press, 1992: "...[Vasco Núñez de Balboa] had his own favorite dog-Leoncico, or "little lion," a reddish-colored cross between a greyhound and a mastiff-that was rewarded at the end of a campaign for the amount of killing it had done. On one much celebrated occasion, Leoncico tore the head off an Indian leader in Panama while Balboa, his men, and other dogs completed the slaughter of everyone in a village that had the ill fortune to lie in their journey's path. Heads of human adults do not come off easily, so the authors of Dogs of the Conquest seem correct in calling this a "remarkable feat," although Balboa's men usually were able to do quite well by themselves. As one contemporary description of this same massacre notes: "The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and from some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts. ...Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs."
Atrocities of the Spanish Conquistadors in the West Indies Account from Bartolome de Las Casas (missionary and conquistadore) circa 1513: "...The Spaniards with their horses, their spears and lances, began to commit murders and other strange cruelties. They entered into towns and villages, sparing neither children nor old men and women. They ripped their bellies and cut them to pieces as if they had been slaughtering lambs in a field....Most tried to flee. They tried to hide in the mountains. They tried to flee from these men. Men who were empty of all pity, behaving like savage beasts. They are nothing more than slaughterers and enemies of mankind. These evil men had even taught their hounds, fierce dogs, to tear natives to pieces at first sight...."
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