Jaume's dog developed various skills other than just guarding people and property. It possessed a ferocity that came in handy in warfare. It was employed by butchers to slaughter cattle, thanks to its powerful jaws. It was used to hunt deer and wild boar, the latter of which used to be abundant on Mallorca (we're talking the late Middle Ages). But it wasn't the finished article. The Ca de Bou was to undergo development through cross-breeding before it definitively became the dog it now is. In the process, its temperament changed. It was used as a sheep dog, rather than one that would have previously spread fear among herds. It did still, though, have an innate aggression which was exploited for the wrong reasons. It fought bulls. It fought other dogs. It even fought exotic creatures imported to the island, like leopards and bears. Its role as a fighting dog was to come to an end by the turn of the twentieth century. Today, it is still very much a guard dog but it is very much more amiable and perfectly companionable if, as with any dog, it is the product of how its owner raises it and treats it.
The Ca de Bou is of significant enough symbolism for it to have been the subject of endless debate. Its precise provenance has been disputed, though it is generally accepted that it was a descendant of the dogs that Jaume brought. However, there was to be further dispute in the late nineteenth century which threatened to undermine the claim of Ca de Bou native status and of its lineage from a breed of Spanish mastiff. An argument arose, and it was one that was centred on the colony of Gatamoix in Alcúdia.
Gatamoix was established by the English engineers who were undertaking the work at Albufera to drain large parts of it and to turn it over to use for agricultural cultivation. Bateman, Waring and Mister Green introduced workers mainly from Pollensa to this colony at the foot of the Sant Marti mountain. They also, so the argument went, introduced the British bulldog. If this were true, then the subsequent story of the Ca de Bou would have been turned on its head. The native dog wouldn't have been nearly as native as thought, as it would have been infiltrated by the English breed.
In order to establish the truth about the dogs at Gatamoix, an historian from Campanet, Damià Ferrà-Ponç, undertook research at the turn of the last century. It was principally through interviews with people who had worked at Gatamoix (by 1900, the colony was in decline). These established that there hadn't been any British bulldogs. The purity of the Ca de Bou was thus preserved.
The World Canine Organisation, more usually referred to by its French name, the Fédération Cynologique Internationale, decreed in 1964 that the Ca de Bou should officially be known as the Mallorcan dog of prey. But it has another name, a Spanish name, and that is the Dogo Mallorquín.
The word dogo is applied to several breeds, all of them mastiffs and mostly all large, such as the Great Dane (Dogo Alemán); the Dogo Mallorquín, by contrast, isn't anything like as large. But where did the word come from, as "perro" is the usual word in Spanish for a dog? The answer is pretty simple. It was lifted from the English "dog", and it started to become usage in Spanish around the seventeenth century, the reason being that English dogs, notably mastiffs, were increasingly popular and increasingly well-known.
So, although English (or British) influence on the Ca de Bou breed has been dismissed, there is a legacy in this alternative name. Not, one fancies, that it will be being used much at the fair in Muro today, where there is a Ca de Bou show and contest (not a fighting one of course). And why does Muro have such a show? Well, there's a good question, and the answer to this might be found in those interviews by Damià Ferrà-Ponç. The intimation from his research was that there was a fair deal of rivalry between different towns as to the history of its dogs. In Muro, so it was claimed, its Ca de Bou was older than others.
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