The move came almost forty years after Afonso had first claimed the royal title for himself and arrived precisely because the pope considered Afonso an intrepid
extirpator of those who hate the Christian name and a diligent propagator of the Christian Faith.
Yet to the
extirpator in his role as preacher, they became nothing more than "ugly rocks", regularly soiled by animals and little boys.(31) Similarly, the conopas, sculpted and natural forms, often of stone, were, to many Andeans, mobile, personal founts of energy, fertility and good fortune.
The well known '
extirpator of idolatry', Jacinto de la Serna, had no qualms about attributing the healing powers of an Indian to a demonic compact; yet, in the very same passage, he describes how he himself performed a similar healing rite on his Indian servant with the bone of a saintly man he had in his possession.
The native religious specialists indeed feared the ladino (bilingual) informants who appeared before the Spanish colonial court, for they considered them to have sided with the
extirpators (137).
Ant community ecologists have sorted resource-defending ants into functional groups within the context of the community Holldobler and Wilson (1990) called resource-defending ants "
extirpators' because they excluded other species through interference competition, fighting, and mass recruitment.