The butcher’s dog

The butcher was an important personality both in villages and towns. He needed strong Corsos to move the cows and the bulls from the cattle market to the slaughterhouse, with people watching this impressive show.

During the week, the butcher slaughtered lambs, sheep, Billy goats, kids, goats, chickens and capons, but before important celebrations he killed bovines and the bull especially. The killing of the bull was the emblem of the circle of life and death, a rite and a short of show whose protagonists were the butcher and the Cane Corso, in a prelude for the feast.

According to popular traditions, the match had a propitiatory meaning: the victory of the strongest, by analogy, gave abundance, fortune and happiness to the community. Every butcher had his own way of slaughtering, using simple and effective techniques, but always helped, either by chance, out of necessity or for the show’s sake, by the Cane Corso. The butcher tethered the bull to the chain of the slaughter with a strong rope, the Corso openly dared it, the bull answered bellowing, thus drawing people’s attention. That was the butcher’s way of advertising its job.

The butcher clubbed the beast with a hammer (this was usually performed by stout butchers that were able to kill the bull with one blow, usually hitting it right at the centre of the head, between the horns).

The butcher needed to be very precise because, in case the bull was just hurt, it could react violently and the help of the dog became thus necessary. Then he hit the bull by a particular knife, the “rapier”, between the occiput and the atlas, obliquely.

The butcher needed to be very experienced and accurate because a vertical stab could hit the occiput thus provoking pain to the bull without killing it. In this case the bull became very dangerous; the Cane Corso was essential.

Sometimes the butcher himself caused the intervention of the dog letting the bull charge it. The Cane Corso attacked the bull biting its nose and, when it was submitted, the butcher could give it the deathblow. The butcher Corso had many charges. Once, the bovines were raised in wild pastures and they had to walk a long way to the slaughterhouse by themselves, obviously led by the butcher and his Corso.

Bulls and buffalos that were born and raised in the wild were as dangerous as the untamed animals. In order to keep the control of the cattle, the bull had to be stopped. As a matter of fact, since the bull was there, the cattle rebelled and escaped. The bull needed to be blocked by the dogs and, during feasts; it was common to see the Corso and the bull fighting, with the dog overcoming the bovine.

During winter, the butcher used to go to farms and slaughter the pigs to supplement his income. Families used to live on vegetable growing and animals farming (goats, pigs and chickens). The huge boar was castrated towards the end of the summer (so that it gained weight and lost its unpleasant genital smell) in order to be killed in winter, after 5-6 months during which it fattened.

The same happened to the old boars at the end of their productive “career”, when they were 3-4 years old. The Corso naturally helped the butcher. The Cane Corso immobilized the boar, while the butcher stabbed it through the heart. The butcher made us of a thin and pointed knife, the so-called “pg-slaughtering knife”

If frequently happened that the butcher dog fought against the straw-stack dog or that a female straw-stack dog coupled with a butcher dog, thus causing genetic exchange.

Nothing of the pig was wasted: the fresh meat of the carcass, the head, the tail, the blood, the trotters and the skin (pork rind), the plucks (heart, liver, spleen lungs and brain), the sweetbread (pancreas and thymus gland), tripe and salted meat (ham and shoulder, in Italian also called “prosciuttella and gambello”, meat and liver sausages, and the “vrucculare” (bacon), were all eaten. The rest of the pig, part of the blood, of the fat, of the skin and of the bones, were given to the farm dogs.

N. Palizzi – 1850 c.ca

La Puglia nelle immagini del ‘700 nel “Vojage pittoresque” de l’Abbé de Saint-Non

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