Victor Perez de Lara 



A dog protected by a blanket, below, was sculpted by an artist of 

 the Chancay people, inhabitants of the Peruvian coast in the 

 fourteenth century. A less whimsical hairless dog, right, is a 

 member of the Mexican breed known as xoloitzcuintli. 



Raul Apesteguia Collection, Lima: Photography by Alana Cordy-Ccllins 



that at least one Ecuadorean sea-trading 

 society existed by that time. Hairless dogs 

 may have originally been brought along 

 on voyages as food, perhaps as a welcome 

 diversion from a diet of fish and seabirds. 

 In ancient Mexico, dogs appear to have 

 been deliberately fattened for human con- 

 sumption, at least for ritual feasts. And the 

 Andean chronicler Guaman Poma de 

 Ayala mentions that coastal people living 

 in northern Peru had a custom of eating 

 dogs (although he does not mention 

 whether the animals were hairless). 



But hairless dogs may have been valued 

 for different or additional reasons. In Mex- 

 ico and Peru, there is a parallel folklore 

 concerning their medicinal properties: 

 some people believe that the dogs' warmth 

 alleviates rheumatism and associated dis- 

 orders. Thus they may have been used 

 much as we use hot- water bottles (a com- 

 mon misconception is that hairless dogs 

 have a higher body temperature than other 

 dogs do; actually, they seem warmer to the 



touch only because of the lack of hair). 

 Furthermore, at least one report indicates 

 that in the Tlaxcala region of Mexico, 

 hairless dogs were sacrificed in times of 

 drought. Such a practice could have been 

 exported to inhabitants of the arid coast of 

 Peru. Finally, the dogs could have been in- 

 troduced simply as an exotic item. 



Some other clues reinforce the conclu- 

 sion that Ecuadorean traders introduced 

 the hairless dogs from Mexico into Peru. 

 Archeologist Leon Doyon, while excavat- 

 ing a fourth- to fifth-century site on the 

 outskirts of Quito, found what might be a 

 partial mandible of a hairless dog — the 

 teeth seem to have been incompletely de- 

 veloped. The chronicler Juan Velasco re- 

 ported the dogs" presence in Ecuador dur- 

 ing the eighteenth century, referring to 

 them by the local name, viringo. And 

 nineteenth-century travelers to Peru no- 

 ticed them in the northern port town of 

 Paita, close to the Ecuadorean border. 

 (Even now, fanciers of the breed in Peru 



travel to the north coast in search of new 

 animals to improve their stock.) 



After the eighth century, numerous Pe- 

 ruvian peoples depicted the hairless dog in 

 their art. The Lambayeque people, directly 

 descended from the Moche and known to 

 have traded with Ecuador, left us the 

 greatest number of representations. One 

 piece was crafted in silver with gold de- 

 tails: a double vessel with the dog on one 

 side and a drinking cup on the other. 



Among the later Peruvian artists to por- 

 tray the dog were the Chancay, who occu- 

 pied the south-central coast in the four- 

 teenth century, before the rise of the Inca 

 empire. They sometimes used their black- 

 and-cream pottery to depict the spotted 

 skin of the hairless dog. One of the Chan- 

 cay dog figures also appears to be wearing 

 a blanket, as indicated by the rectangular 

 motif with geometric designs painted 

 across the animal's back. Perhaps the artist 

 knew a hairless dog that suff'ered from ex- 

 posure even on the temperate coast. D 



40 Natural History 2/94 



