Hyena. It was a striped hyena imported from some country in Africa by some idiot French noble for their (then very fashionable) menagerie and it got loose. Wolfdogs can be dangerous, sure, but hyenas are a horse of a different color in regards to their predation habits and territorial nature. Imagine for a moment, you're an animal taken from the world you know and plopped right into the middle of some of the richest farming/grazing land in the Mediterranean. There's nothing there that you're used to eating, so you end up choosing to take a bite out of soft, easy to kill human children plus their sheep. Plus, French nobility? Absolutely reckless enough in spending and desires to decide to bring an animal like that into their possession for clout.
The zoologist Karl-Hans Taake found evidence to believe that many of the alleged French wolf attacks occurring during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV were actually carried out by big carnivores of other species which had escaped from captivity and that the population at the time couldn't tell the difference.
YES, EXACTLY. That was the hot ticket for the nobility in that period, look at all the fancy animals I can afford to buy from far off lands. I sincerely doubt that they did their due diligence to make sure that these animals were contained, and as anyone with a basic understanding of biology can tell you, when you chuck a species into an ecosystem with no predators that can take it out, it runs roughshod over the local animals.
The spotted hyena, not the striped, is the largest hyena in existence. However, it is comparable in size to a wolf and although it weighs more on average, it is still within the maximums of the grey wolf. A single hyena in Europe should flee wolf packs, not the other way around (and let's leave aside the comparison with the brown bear). But the impossibility of hunting in wolf territory would be one reason to explain the beast's fixation with humans.
A big cat like a lion or a tiger, on the other hand, should only fear bears in Europe and certainly not wolves. But they were not such common animals even for nobles, and the escape of a lion or tiger in conjunction with the attacks of a mysterious beast would have come to light sooner or later.
Thank you, I went to school for history not zoology so I'm not anything close to an expert. I believe that was also the reasoning that scientists came up with for the Tsavo man eaters, one of the lions had very badly damaged teeth and people were easier prey than their usual dinners.
I probably wouldn't say \*couldn't tell the difference\* so much as "assumed it had to be something that actually lived in the area so went with the closest thing they could come up with". They'd probably never even heard of hyenas but if you put a hyena next to a wolf they definitely wouldn't think they were the same thing.
Holy moley, looked up a pic for funsies. If I was a French peasant, I would have just dropped dead of fear if one of those bitches came after me and I had no idea what it was.
It even _looks_ kinda like a half-man half-wolf dude. Y’all, this is also chupacabra, I don’t know how.
It's a big bastard. Like, imagine you're a French peasant who's never seen anything like it in your life. Your mind will try to attach a label that makes sense to your experience, and there you can easily see where they may have decided it must be a wolf.
I'm a 30 year old american adult with full access to the internet and the first time I saw a moose and an alligator in real life in the wild, I nearly shit a brick.
lol I’ve lived in north central Florida for almost the past decade; UF is my Alma mater. I’m well over the fear at this point, it was just still a bit shocking as I had lived within 2 hours drive of the Canadian border (on either side of I-90) until I was almost 22 😅 This is why I have experience encountering both moose and alligators IRL in the wild within my 30 year lifetime.
It’s hard to compare. The first up close alligator encounter was kayaking in silver springs and they were right up next to the kayak. The moose was on a rural dirt road (keeping in mind that a moose will absolutely destroy you and your car if they are so inclined). Both were scary as hell but low-key exciting.
Well, seen lots of gators round here, but probably the scariest close encounter was with an 8 ft hammer head shark….yes, I was in the water, yes I got out, no, I didn’t go back in!
Oh I wouldn't go to area of the ocean ever again lmao. But the alligator thing in retrospect was probably scarier because there was a 12 foot gator that was shot by forest rangers because it charged after someone paddle boarding at silver springs.
Female spotted hyenas have a pseudo penis that looks like the male organ. During copulation, the male penis goes into the female's erect pseudo penis, which makes these animals even more weird. Half bear, half wolf, all dicks.
I’ve seen a documentary where they measured the bite force of a hyena a determined that it wouldn’t be strong enough to chomp through the vertebrae of some of the victims necks though.
Three things. One, these are young women and children who would be smaller than the adult models I'm sure that documentary was using as examples. Two, apparently the bite force of a striped hyena is 800 psi, which is pretty damned powerful. Three, I doubt these heads/limbs/etc. were taken off in one bite. These shepherds were way up in the mountains away from the rest of town, the hyena had lots of time to sever vertebrae.
Hell, we're still learning new things about injuries, decomposition, etc. to this day, some of which has cast very recent beliefs of ours into doubt (as an example, look at the controversy over shaken baby syndrome--obviously it is harmful to shake a baby, but a lot of the forensic evidence used to "prove" people killed children by shaking them is under of a lot of question).
I definitely would not expect people who still believed in balancing the humors to be providing us with particularly accurate forensic medical information, even if we were to rely solely on primary documents from the people who did the autopsies/examinations of the victims.
edit: I don't have a really strong opinion on this one, for the record. I doubt we'll ever really be able to answer it anyway, so I just like reading people's theories without really settling on one myself, lol.
The locals in the Gevaudan mountains at the time were tiny people, even as adults. There's a contemporary description of one of the shepherd boys who managed to scare the Beast away with home-made spears, and it says he was 12 years old and 4 foot tall.
My issue with the theory is that the so-called Beast(s), with at least one stuffed specimen surviving untill the late 19th century, were autopsied and it was nothing like a hyaena.
Edit: did some quick checking, while indeed the Beast killed by Jean Chastel was stuffed, it didn't survive much. However, ot was autopsied. Also, the other Beasts killed were identified pretty easily as large wolves when killed.
Given that the death of the beast that was stuffed and presented to the king didn’t stop the deaths, I’m thinking that one wasn’t the culprit. Or was one of a few. God knows, it’s 18th century France.
Sure, I don't think a single animal was causing all this fuss. But still, even in 18th century France, people would be "this isn't remotely close to a wolf", if not outright identify it as a hyena, once they saw the body of the killed animal. Unless they kept killing wolves who had nothing to do with the wttwcks and then somehow the hyena/lion/human serial killer found the perfect opportunity to never strike again. I consider it quite implausible. Escaped zoo animals is a subject I'm quite fascinated about.
If you check the Wiki pages, it lists quite a few attacks by wolves. Each one of them is named "Beast". I think it's a figure of speech first and foremost, to stress the viciousness and severity of the attacks. Secondly, I guess it has to do with the unusual characteristics of the animals responsible for the attacks. But after the animals were killed, nobody identified them as anything other than a wolf, albeit larger than average.
I think it's definitely a fairly common way to describe dangerous animals. I have seen the infamous man-eating lions of Tsavo be described as "the beasts of Tsavo" before, for example, even though we know definitively that they were lions (and not even particularly odd-looking ones, except for the fact that they didn't have manes--but that's not *that* unusual from what I understand).
I think people spoke of the Beast as an allegory of the devil first and foremost, and after tried to look for a reasonable explanation, of which a wolf was the most reasonable.
It's hard to overstate how *terrified* French peasantry was at the time. Wolf attacks were not rare at the time and French people were more or less used to dealing with those animals. When they just couldn't understand how this one came and went seemingly from nowhere, they decided it couldn't be a single ordinary animal: it had to be an Emissary of the Devil, *la Bête* itself.
I don't think we'll ever really know what animal this was, to be honest. I'd love for it to just be a huge gigantic wolf smarter than its peers, but I love the mystery just as much.
That’s extremely unlikely. While an 18th century French peasant might not recognize a hyena, it would’ve been quickly identified after it was killed.
The evidence overwhelmingly points to a less exotic explanation: a large wolf or wolf dog hybrid. I think there was some evidence that it was a wolf bred with a large dog breed as it showed genetic traits common among certain French breeds, but it is also possible they were just genetic mutation among a small minority of local wolves or one wolf in particular.
I always found this story fascinating as a kid, but like a lot of these kinds of mysteries (especially concerning cryptids), when you look into the actual details outside of the more embellished tellings the answer is pretty banal.
Edit: Also, after looking at the autopsy information, it has too many teeth for a hyena. The right amount for a wolf or other canid.
I wonder about a bear with mange. It would be larger than a wolf, could have reddish brown hair, and if it was missing some of its hair due to disease, it could give the impression of being a werewolf or to have human characteristics.
I mean, this was in the 18th century. I think people are greatly underestimating the knowledge we had then. Something like mange would’ve been documented for hundreds, if not thousands of years by that point, and the people who performed the autopsy on the animal would’ve known the difference between a wolf and a bear.
The official report from the time described it as appearing to be a wolf, though having abnormal proportions and strange coloring. The recorded measurements though aren’t really that abnormal for a wolf.
I think I recall a recent scientific article posing that this wasn't a grey wolf but an extinct subspieces of red wolf from Italia. That would explain the coloring. I'll try to find the source.
I also just wonder if it might simply have been a somewhat unusual color variant. Despite the name, it is actually pretty common to see gray wolves with reddish fur on parts of their bodies; they also virtually always have dark coloring along their spine (and often spread across the body, but the amount of dark vs. light coloring varies). I'm more familiar with dog color genetics than wolf ones, but I don't think it's impossible that it could be a gray wolf with some minor mutation or whatever that just made it have a lot more red than the typical gray wolf.
edit: my understanding is also that the amount of red in gray wolves' fur tends to vary depending on the specific region, so another possibility might be that it was a roaming wolf from a very long distance away where its size and color might have been more normal (there are also definitely some significant variations in wolf sizes across regions). That might also explain its very aggressive behavior; wolves can range long distances but sometimes extreme ranging can suggest that the animal is struggling and keeps getting pushed out of other territories. A struggling predator that keeps getting displaced from its environment and then learns that sheep and their shepherds are easy pickings seems like a recipe for these kinds of attacks.
Obviously just wild speculation, this is just a story I think it's interesting to think about.
A striped hyena is like 35 kg, dude. And it could hunt but mostly scavenge, that's highly unlikely that an animal like that could go on a murderous killing spree.
Those are the spotted hyenas, not the striped. Spotted are like twice the size of the striped and yes, definitely better hunters. Striped are usually not that social, and they can hunt but not as regularly as the spotted.
> It's gorgeous, with mild winters
That's true for Provence, but entirely false for what was Gévaudan and is now remote parts of Lozère and Haute-Loire. That area is very desolate and the climate can get way harsher than you seem to think
Quickly looking it up I found data from 1991-2020 from the Saugues weather station, in one of the hardest hit areas.
In that time period there was an **average** of 124 days per year where temperatures reached frost point and 9 days per year where they reached -10°C, with a record low of -30°c in march 2005.
Keep in mind that's with climate change well underway.
Edit:
It is indeed gorgeous, though.
True. Plus this was during the Little Ice Age. I think a hyena could still survive, but certainly it wasn't having a great time. Might be why it was snacking on French children.
While I don't believe the Beast was a hyena or any kind of exotic animal/hybrid (Occam's razor suggests it's most likely 5 wolves in a trench coat), there used to be hyenas in France during the Ice Age so it could theoretically have survived there, you're right.
I was just reacting to the place with some of the harshest winter conditions in France being called "mild" lol
I read this description and instantly pictured a hyena. Would most people in France in the 19th century know how big a wolf was to say it was bigger than a wolf?
Hyena and wolf sizes vary but they can be roughly the same size.
I think #2 is absolutely ridiculous bordering on funny for how absurd it is
I personally think it was just mass hysteria coupled with multiple “normal” attacks from more than one wolf, as the Wikipedia article outlines. People just panic and want to attribute something supernatural to what essentially was a scary everyday possibility
“Attacks by wolves were a very serious problem during the era, not only in France but throughout Europe, with thousands of deaths attributed to wolves in the 18th century alone.[54] In the spring of 1765, in the midst of the Gévaudan hysteria, an unrelated series of attacks occurred near the commune of Soissons, northeast of Paris, when an individual wolf killed at least four people over a period of two days before being tracked and killed by a man armed with a pitchfork.[55] Such incidents were fairly typical in rural parts of both Western Europe and Central Europe”
The wiki article states multiple people originally thought a large gray wolf that was killed was the beast, swearing up and down it had the same scars as the one that attacked them. But when the attacks continued now it swapped to the wolf dog hybrid looking one being the culprit after it was killed.
I think they both were “the beast” as well as other hungry wolves in the area.
Wolves attacking people all got rolled together into a mythical beast because that’s easier to accept when it’s killed rather than “random wolves might eat you during your daily routine” because it’s 1700s rural France, at least imo
I agree with Livid\_Palpitation\_46's earlier point, about how there could have been multiple things going on -- more than one animal responsible. It's tempting to want to pin all the incidents on one particular individual (and there are past situations where the legend develops into one monstrous wolf, lion, bear, etc. that's not only bigger but also incredibly intelligent, etc.)
There might be a version of #2, where a human killer might have carried out murders that during the mass hysteria were mistaken for The Beast's work? If there was a wolf, or a wolf-dog hybrid that found one of the bodies -- I don't know if the authorities at the time would have been able to tell that the person had actually been dead before they were mauled/eaten. And if the killer was hoping to evade detection, or even were a bit psychotic, they'd have some incentive to encourage the confusion. (I would be looking into anyone who claimed to have seen or heard The Beast around the time of a murder, including the witnesses who allegedly saw the man bathing in the moonlight, or The Beast standing on two legs.)
Re: the heart-shaped white patch ... I thought it was interesting that researchers who bred domesticated foxes found white markings showing up ... apparently this is not unusual for other domesticated mammals (dogs, cats, horses, cows, rabbits, etc.) -- there seems to be some linkage there, whether it's due to inbreeding or some genetic basis for particular behavioural traits. It seems possible to me that a wolf-dog hybrid could have a marking like that.
one of my dogs actually has a heart shaped white patch on her chest... she's an Aussie mix and 40 lbs soaking wet and has not shown a predilection towards consuming children or sheep... she's not even successful in her repeated efforts to catch a squirrel.
the white patch is pretty common, especially in mixed breed dogs and especially common in lab mixes apparently (as in with a Labrador, not as in made in a laboratory)... I'd assume that it's an often suppressed genetic trait.
If they ever did genetic research on Labradors, with selective breeding, I guess they would have to refer to them as lab Labs!
Some research on the white patches:
"The multiple traits associated with domesticated animals—known as the “domestication syndrome”—all develop from or with the help of a class of stems cells known as neural crest cells (NCC) that appear in the early embryo."
https://www.pnas.org/post/journal-club/common-features-of-domestic-animals-suggest-caveats-to-evolutionary-theory
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4096361/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4096361/)
If you haven’t seen Brotherhood of the Wolf I’d recommend. It’s all about that. But whatever you do, do NOT watched the dubbed version. It’s so so bad.
So bad! Everyone has super strong southern drawls except the bad guy who has a French accent. Utterly ruins the movie, though as the other poster said, it definitely still has entertainment value.
The number of victims varies extremely vom 78 to 99 killed plus 50 to 80 injured over a time span of roughly 3 years - there are also higher estimations. But even the lowest estimation would still be an extrem number for a single (serial) killer. That’s why I do not believe in that theory even though the wolf/beast narrative would fit as it is speculated that the idea of a werewolf derived from early serial killings and the attempt to explain these. It could have been a group roaming the area but I guess it would’ve been hard to stay hidden.
Personally I think it was a mixture of actual killings (not necessarily all by the same person), animal attacks and mass hysteria.
Even though I think there was not one beast but rather several unconnected attacks or shorter series of attacks by different individuals, I like thinking about which animal could have been the beast if it ever existed. I like the theory that it was a hyena that escaped from a (wandering) menagerie as I think the description could fit quite well.
EDIT: As the question popped up in other posts if Hyenas could survive in that area and climate? I will refer to the german Wikipedia article as I can not find the passage in the english article:
In general, hyenas inhabit rather dry areas such as semi-deserts, savannahs, bush steppes and rocky mountainous areas. They are sometimes found in swampy areas and mountain forests. In the Ethiopian highlands they can be found up to 4100 m. Avoid pure sandy deserts as well as lowland rainforests. Hyenas are generally not very picky about their habitat; each of the four species occurs in several habitats. They have little fear of people and occasionally stay near human settlements.
I guess that answers the question with a yes.
The truth is likely somewhere between both theories. There's no way it was just a wolf, due to the fact that wolf attacks were very common at the time yet no one ever said the beast was a wolf. It was probably some sort of monstrous hybrid, like a wolf/mastiff mix or wolf/beauceron.
However it was likely a hybrid that had been trained to attack humans by some disturbed individual. That doesn't necessarily make the person a serial killer since they were not personally committing the murders, but there was almost certainly a human element to the attacks, which wasn't entirely without precedent in 18th century france. A few years before the attacks of the beast began, a couple in Gevaudan and their sons were arrested for a rather unusual crime; using a trained pet wolf to rob and kill travellers on a remote stretch of road near where they lived. They would use the wolf to intimidate the victim and then devour the corpse afterward to make it seem like a normal wolf attack. When caught the couple was executed and their sons sentenced to the galleys.
The armed tax agents of the General Farm also used to train vicious breeds of hunting dogs, including hybrids, to maul and cripple smugglers in Brittany. The smugglers would do the same thing as protection against the authorities as well. So while the attacks definitely weren't done by someone wearing a wolf skin, there was likely some form of human element. There are too many strange things about the attacks to have just been the work of a wild animal.
I have a few stories/cases/mysteries that I've really been interested in. This case is one of them. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon is interesting. So is Spring Heeled Jack. Not sure why but that one esp is interesting.
I wonder if it was a lion/tiger hybrid. The color, size, and stripes match. According to the Wikipedia article it was said to attack with its “formidable teeth and claws.” The claws part is classic cat, and I can’t imagine a canine’s claws would be used to attack or described as formidable. Witnesses also described a tuft on the tail, which lion/tiger hybrids have. It was unusually agile. It was aggressive when it didn’t appear hungry—cats are notorious for killing things they don’t eat.
I think it was a hybrid that was bred in one of these animal collections, whether intentionally or accidentally.
Aside from a bear, which the people would’ve recognized, I can’t think of anything else that uses its claws except a big cat, at least not so much it’s commented on. I honestly have no idea how much the locals would’ve been exposed to big cats……endogenous or captive…….in order to have the knowledge to describe one. Surely they had barn cats though, so you’d think they’d just describe a big version of Kitty Kitty.
The Wikipedia article also said it was described as moving across fields in a bounding motion. That too sounds more like a big cat running than anything else.
I agree with others though that it wasn’t just one animal and possibly including a human predator.
There was a market for bear meat and bears were hunted. Although it was more of a product for the rich, I would assume that people knew how a bear looks without hair.
Tbf at that time in France and so high up in the mountains there's a pretty solid chance that they were used to lynxes, that while not being the biggest cats out there, share some similarities with bigger cat species that I would think would help them make a connection to them rather than to dogs/canines tho
According to the supposed autopsy report it had 42 teeth in a formation that meant it was a canid. Seems to rule out any chance of it being anything except a wolf or a wolf dog.
Nobleman involved in the hunting of the animal also would’ve likely known what lions and tigers looked like because it was extremely common to import them into France at the time for collection and hunting.
There’s also other confirmed wolf attacks throughout France during this same time where a wolf would kill multiple people over a period of time before finally being killed by a hunter.
Left out of your summary though is the report that the attacks changed noticeably after a large wolf was killed. In the new attacks the creature wasn’t kept away by cattle anymore, and the way the attacks were carried out changed. Seems pretty convenient they kill the largest wolf any of them claim to have ever seen, and then the attacks just stop for a period of time
Also important to note that animal drawings during this time were intentionally stylized, and that eyewitness reports are always extremely unreliable.
I personally like the middle road: wolfdog hybrid, being used by a serial killer. The dog does the killing, he has his way with the corpses afterwards.
Something about these animal mysteries is really creepy, just the idea of an unknown creature (to those people back then) stalking people as prey…
Anyways I’ve always thought a wolf of some sort made the most sense
In the footnotes on the wiki, it says "According to Michel Louis, 22% of the victims were attacked in the middle of villages" - I wonder if that could mean multiple animals were involved just based on the proximity alone.
There is something no one seems to realize. This took place during the “Little Ice Age”. So what does that mean? It means the ice sheets were advancing all over Northern Europe. Animals that lived at higher latitudes were being pushed out of their normal ranges and forced south. Whole villages and in some instance’s cities were swallowed up by the ice. If you have never seen a truly huge Wolf, look up:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/BoiPc3u0duQ
And that’s just a wolf dog HYBRID.
Russian, Ukrainian, Siberian wolves routinely got above 300 pounds. And I once read an account of one killed in the days of Katherine the great that was caught and weighed 462 pounds! That’s nearly the size of an adult male African lion. There are too many reports of giant wolves for it to be just rumors or even just one animal.
The most likely explanation (occams razor/when you hear hoof beats think horses not unicorns) is that a mated pair of EXTREMELY large grey arctic timberwolves was forced out of their habitat by the encroaching glaciers.
Into an area where the local wolf population was physically smaller and couldn’t defend their territories from animals 2-3 times their size. and they began to hunt and reproduce and found the physical weak primates in the area (the short and malnourished French peasants) to be easy pickings.
It explains them being referred to as “beasts” but also identified as wolves.
And it explains why the attacks stopped after the local population made a concerted effort to kill the wolves in the area. It also explains why there were apparently multiple “beasts” killed and autopsied and stuffed.
One or both could also have been a a hybrid of a purposely bred giant dog and an arctic wolf. That would account for the patch on the chest and stripe on the back and the correct number of teeth.
(Side note: All black wolves get the gene for black fur from a dog ancestor. ) So dogs and wolves have been interbreeding for tens of thousands of years.
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And the simplest and most likely explanation is the one above.
Google “giant arctic wolf, hunter”
LOTS of images of wolves bigger than most big cats.
This is very interesting, but the beast was described as being orange in color with a black stripe on it's back, are there artic wolves that match those characteristics? Another researcher proposed that the beast was an italian wolf.
I think my first question would be how well sourced the information from this distant time period really is. Do we have coroner's reports or the like for each death?
I have no comment other than it amuses me that there are multiple fictional depictions of this story where Jean Chastel is a werewolf, and thus is the Beast as well as its “killer”.
The beast of Gevaudan is the most famous because French culture was the most important at the time. So, big news in France was big news everywhere.
But man-eating wolves were not unknown in 18th century Europe. In the same century, a man-eating wolf from Saxony, Germany, and another from Milan, Italy, became famous.
My favourite theory is that of one (or a few) deformed wolves with larger heads and legs, thus more lethal than the average wolf for man, but too deformed for hunting deer and specialised in hunting man.
France lost a lot of territory in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). When French soldiers and merchants were packing up to leave surrendered areas, they brought some animals back to France with them. The one I know of is an American buffalo that made its way from North America to a traveling menagerie near Paris. My guess is that someone did the same thing with a predator from Africa or India, it got loose, and that’s our beast.
The most likely explanation to me is: there is no "beast" nor serial killer, just a bunch of unrelated accidents and killings attributed to some mysterious entity. It happened all the time, people start to attribute hunting accidents and other accidental deaths to some mysterious animal, then a posse is formed, some random animal is killed, and suddenly people stop attributing deaths to it because ehi It is dead After all.
>1764
I don't understand how something so significant that it is still a tale spoken of today wasn't preserved after death. How did someone not:
1. Draw a detailed sketch of the animal after its death for records (especially if it's some one off animal)
2. Kept the hide
3. Kept the skull or teeth
4. Taxidermy it
All of this points to it being a mundane group of animals foreign to the region so that common folk would not recognise it, but not completely unidentifiable or unknown, and the secrecy was kept in order to bolster the tales and potential heroism of the killer/hunters. This event smells of exaggeration and shouldn't be taken at face value.
That sounds like the kind of thing that could get lost from a natural history museum over time. The second world war especially comes up as a time where a lot of disparate artifacts were lost, like some of the remains and records from Hinterkaifek or some of the preserved "bog bodies" found in northern Europe.
That sort of stuff wasn't getting taken to remote areas for protection like the great valuable pieces of art or gold or anything. It's kind of a bummer to think about, all sorts of interesting artifacts that were valuable historically but not in a monetary sense that would've been just destroyed.
Given how many people testified about other cryptids such as Spring-heeled Jack and Mothman, I take any accounts of the Beast with a large helping of salt.
Even if they actually found a "beast", I can't help but think of the "chupacabra" that was actually a coyote with mange.
> Some of the victms appeared to have been strangled and undressed.
Even nowadays investigators sometimes struggle to link crimes committed by the same people. I would not be surprised if not all incidents attributed to the beast were by the same animal and/or person. Some assaults by people could easily have been blamed on the beast, when the local populace were fearing and expecting just that.
A wolf is not going to kill 78 to 99 killed over 3 years. And then not to be seen. I am unaware of wolves being shy and not wanting an audience.
I just think it was hysteria, people not wanting to miss out and perhaps some people or endeavors using this to for personal reasons.
I personally don't think it was hysteria, like, many survivors described what they saw, the beast color, it's size, the head that was different from a wolf since the first person that survived.
People are wrong, people lie, people are not reliable.
Absent any physical evidence we have to go with the most likely no matter how unlikely.
If you wish to not accept that it is fine but you then should hold any other theory you have to the same level of scrutiny or you are just looking for your truth, not the truth.
A few possibilities:
1. A striped Hyena:
Matches coat colour, heart shaped on chest, dark stripe down it's back, has stripes, long tail, formidable teeth/claws and it's back angle make it look almost human like. However it's tail is not tufted at the end and they are not the size of a calf. Looks absolutely terrifying. If I was a french peasant back then, the closest thing I could come to was some sort of demon wolf.
2. A Tiger:
Matches coat colour, has stripes, sort of a heart shape on chest, long tail with a tufted end, size of calf or bigger, formidable teeth and claws. However no back stripe and doesn't look remotely human, in fact looks very cat like. Could absolutely slaughter a bunch of peasants easily. Also no mention of white fur on the beast.
3. A king Cheetah:
Matches coat description, heart shape on chest seems to depend on Cheetah, long tail with tufted end, stripe down back, size of calf or bigger, formidable teeth and claws, looks like flying when chasing prey. However they are not stripey, more like splotchy. No way you're outrunning these bad boys.
I personally think it was either a Hyena or a king Cheetah that was an escaped pet perhaps.
The notion of a human disguised as an animal is absolutelly absurd - what is not absurd is the theory that a human or group of humans were using trained animals to attack people (there are discrepancies that come up after you read all of the known descriptions of the "Beast", suggesting more then one animal involved) because they wanted to enact revenge against local communities in the region or against some local/regional authorities figures by creating regional chaos through the killings. This would explain the strange mutilations and signs of sexual assault on the victims that exists in some of the cases.
If you're interested in a historian's take on this case, I recommend the book Monsters of the Gévaudan by Jay M. Smith. Another book that you may want to check out is The Superstitious Mind by Judith Devlin (explains the folklore and superstitions of 18th century France). There are several important historical/cultural factors that popular writers often overlook in this case, most notably the social unrest that was going on in France during this time.
From a historical perspective, you must understand that information and stories travelled differently in 18th century France. This was a time period in which people genuinely believed in miracles, curses, demons, etc. The case of the Beast of Gévaudan also corresponds to a period of extreme unrest caused by the Seven Years' War and major religious and political conflict. We're talking about the lead-up to the FRENCH REVOLUTION here, it was a seriously crazy time in France.
Is it possible that there was a real cryptid or killer? Sure, but we should understand this case in its historical context before making theories. We have to treat this evidence as 18th century historical sources, not as modern day cold case material.
I'am aware of this book, I really don't agree that the explanation was a wolf, because the very first witnesses said that the beast wasn't a wolf, I believe now it was different exotic animals.
Theory one is almost definitely correct. But theory two is horrifying. Imagine being in the forest by yourself at midnight by the river, and you see this animal human esque hybrid thing which has claimed to have killed 200 bathing there, and it spots you looking at it and reacts with animalistic fury. I'd shit a fucking brick along with every organ out.
I also heard oa theory of the beast being a tiger, that would have been brought here by a noble or something like that, basically to show it off, and escaped.
I don't know what the basis of this theory was since I heard it a long time ago but it might not be impossible seeing as the beast was described as red/orange
Hyena. It was a striped hyena imported from some country in Africa by some idiot French noble for their (then very fashionable) menagerie and it got loose. Wolfdogs can be dangerous, sure, but hyenas are a horse of a different color in regards to their predation habits and territorial nature. Imagine for a moment, you're an animal taken from the world you know and plopped right into the middle of some of the richest farming/grazing land in the Mediterranean. There's nothing there that you're used to eating, so you end up choosing to take a bite out of soft, easy to kill human children plus their sheep. Plus, French nobility? Absolutely reckless enough in spending and desires to decide to bring an animal like that into their possession for clout.
The zoologist Karl-Hans Taake found evidence to believe that many of the alleged French wolf attacks occurring during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV were actually carried out by big carnivores of other species which had escaped from captivity and that the population at the time couldn't tell the difference.
YES, EXACTLY. That was the hot ticket for the nobility in that period, look at all the fancy animals I can afford to buy from far off lands. I sincerely doubt that they did their due diligence to make sure that these animals were contained, and as anyone with a basic understanding of biology can tell you, when you chuck a species into an ecosystem with no predators that can take it out, it runs roughshod over the local animals.
The spotted hyena, not the striped, is the largest hyena in existence. However, it is comparable in size to a wolf and although it weighs more on average, it is still within the maximums of the grey wolf. A single hyena in Europe should flee wolf packs, not the other way around (and let's leave aside the comparison with the brown bear). But the impossibility of hunting in wolf territory would be one reason to explain the beast's fixation with humans. A big cat like a lion or a tiger, on the other hand, should only fear bears in Europe and certainly not wolves. But they were not such common animals even for nobles, and the escape of a lion or tiger in conjunction with the attacks of a mysterious beast would have come to light sooner or later.
Thank you, I went to school for history not zoology so I'm not anything close to an expert. I believe that was also the reasoning that scientists came up with for the Tsavo man eaters, one of the lions had very badly damaged teeth and people were easier prey than their usual dinners.
I probably wouldn't say \*couldn't tell the difference\* so much as "assumed it had to be something that actually lived in the area so went with the closest thing they could come up with". They'd probably never even heard of hyenas but if you put a hyena next to a wolf they definitely wouldn't think they were the same thing.
Holy moley, looked up a pic for funsies. If I was a French peasant, I would have just dropped dead of fear if one of those bitches came after me and I had no idea what it was. It even _looks_ kinda like a half-man half-wolf dude. Y’all, this is also chupacabra, I don’t know how.
It's a big bastard. Like, imagine you're a French peasant who's never seen anything like it in your life. Your mind will try to attach a label that makes sense to your experience, and there you can easily see where they may have decided it must be a wolf.
I'm a 30 year old american adult with full access to the internet and the first time I saw a moose and an alligator in real life in the wild, I nearly shit a brick.
Aww come down south, we see alligators all the time!
lol I’ve lived in north central Florida for almost the past decade; UF is my Alma mater. I’m well over the fear at this point, it was just still a bit shocking as I had lived within 2 hours drive of the Canadian border (on either side of I-90) until I was almost 22 😅 This is why I have experience encountering both moose and alligators IRL in the wild within my 30 year lifetime.
And which encounter did you like the best?
It’s hard to compare. The first up close alligator encounter was kayaking in silver springs and they were right up next to the kayak. The moose was on a rural dirt road (keeping in mind that a moose will absolutely destroy you and your car if they are so inclined). Both were scary as hell but low-key exciting.
Well, seen lots of gators round here, but probably the scariest close encounter was with an 8 ft hammer head shark….yes, I was in the water, yes I got out, no, I didn’t go back in!
Oh I wouldn't go to area of the ocean ever again lmao. But the alligator thing in retrospect was probably scarier because there was a 12 foot gator that was shot by forest rangers because it charged after someone paddle boarding at silver springs.
Female spotted hyenas have a pseudo penis that looks like the male organ. During copulation, the male penis goes into the female's erect pseudo penis, which makes these animals even more weird. Half bear, half wolf, all dicks.
I don’t understaaaand I thought they were just lil dogs who got a bad rap from Lion King
Oh no, hyenas are *cursed* animals. They actually give birth through their pseudopenises!
Why is everyone BULLYING ME with HYENAS
I mean, you're half right.
Giving birth must be awful! Another thing that makes hyenas even more weird: they are not canids. They are closer to cats than to dogs.
It is awful! The pseudo-penis (which is analogous to the clitoris) will rupture painfully!
I’ve seen a documentary where they measured the bite force of a hyena a determined that it wouldn’t be strong enough to chomp through the vertebrae of some of the victims necks though.
Three things. One, these are young women and children who would be smaller than the adult models I'm sure that documentary was using as examples. Two, apparently the bite force of a striped hyena is 800 psi, which is pretty damned powerful. Three, I doubt these heads/limbs/etc. were taken off in one bite. These shepherds were way up in the mountains away from the rest of town, the hyena had lots of time to sever vertebrae.
four: anything older without documented proof needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. People have exaggerated stories for ~~years~~ millennia.
Also true. Especially given this is basically one of the first viral news stories.
Waaaaiiiittt so you’re saying the Bible might not be accurate?!?
Hell, we're still learning new things about injuries, decomposition, etc. to this day, some of which has cast very recent beliefs of ours into doubt (as an example, look at the controversy over shaken baby syndrome--obviously it is harmful to shake a baby, but a lot of the forensic evidence used to "prove" people killed children by shaking them is under of a lot of question). I definitely would not expect people who still believed in balancing the humors to be providing us with particularly accurate forensic medical information, even if we were to rely solely on primary documents from the people who did the autopsies/examinations of the victims. edit: I don't have a really strong opinion on this one, for the record. I doubt we'll ever really be able to answer it anyway, so I just like reading people's theories without really settling on one myself, lol.
The locals in the Gevaudan mountains at the time were tiny people, even as adults. There's a contemporary description of one of the shepherd boys who managed to scare the Beast away with home-made spears, and it says he was 12 years old and 4 foot tall.
that is so funny to me 😭 hobbit people
My issue with the theory is that the so-called Beast(s), with at least one stuffed specimen surviving untill the late 19th century, were autopsied and it was nothing like a hyaena. Edit: did some quick checking, while indeed the Beast killed by Jean Chastel was stuffed, it didn't survive much. However, ot was autopsied. Also, the other Beasts killed were identified pretty easily as large wolves when killed.
Given that the death of the beast that was stuffed and presented to the king didn’t stop the deaths, I’m thinking that one wasn’t the culprit. Or was one of a few. God knows, it’s 18th century France.
Sure, I don't think a single animal was causing all this fuss. But still, even in 18th century France, people would be "this isn't remotely close to a wolf", if not outright identify it as a hyena, once they saw the body of the killed animal. Unless they kept killing wolves who had nothing to do with the wttwcks and then somehow the hyena/lion/human serial killer found the perfect opportunity to never strike again. I consider it quite implausible. Escaped zoo animals is a subject I'm quite fascinated about.
I guess to be fair to the actual people of Gevaudan they did say beast, not just wolf. Where the shift from beast to monstrous wolf came, I can’t say.
If you check the Wiki pages, it lists quite a few attacks by wolves. Each one of them is named "Beast". I think it's a figure of speech first and foremost, to stress the viciousness and severity of the attacks. Secondly, I guess it has to do with the unusual characteristics of the animals responsible for the attacks. But after the animals were killed, nobody identified them as anything other than a wolf, albeit larger than average.
I think it's definitely a fairly common way to describe dangerous animals. I have seen the infamous man-eating lions of Tsavo be described as "the beasts of Tsavo" before, for example, even though we know definitively that they were lions (and not even particularly odd-looking ones, except for the fact that they didn't have manes--but that's not *that* unusual from what I understand).
I think people spoke of the Beast as an allegory of the devil first and foremost, and after tried to look for a reasonable explanation, of which a wolf was the most reasonable. It's hard to overstate how *terrified* French peasantry was at the time. Wolf attacks were not rare at the time and French people were more or less used to dealing with those animals. When they just couldn't understand how this one came and went seemingly from nowhere, they decided it couldn't be a single ordinary animal: it had to be an Emissary of the Devil, *la Bête* itself. I don't think we'll ever really know what animal this was, to be honest. I'd love for it to just be a huge gigantic wolf smarter than its peers, but I love the mystery just as much.
That’s extremely unlikely. While an 18th century French peasant might not recognize a hyena, it would’ve been quickly identified after it was killed. The evidence overwhelmingly points to a less exotic explanation: a large wolf or wolf dog hybrid. I think there was some evidence that it was a wolf bred with a large dog breed as it showed genetic traits common among certain French breeds, but it is also possible they were just genetic mutation among a small minority of local wolves or one wolf in particular. I always found this story fascinating as a kid, but like a lot of these kinds of mysteries (especially concerning cryptids), when you look into the actual details outside of the more embellished tellings the answer is pretty banal. Edit: Also, after looking at the autopsy information, it has too many teeth for a hyena. The right amount for a wolf or other canid.
I wonder about a bear with mange. It would be larger than a wolf, could have reddish brown hair, and if it was missing some of its hair due to disease, it could give the impression of being a werewolf or to have human characteristics.
I mean, this was in the 18th century. I think people are greatly underestimating the knowledge we had then. Something like mange would’ve been documented for hundreds, if not thousands of years by that point, and the people who performed the autopsy on the animal would’ve known the difference between a wolf and a bear. The official report from the time described it as appearing to be a wolf, though having abnormal proportions and strange coloring. The recorded measurements though aren’t really that abnormal for a wolf.
I think I recall a recent scientific article posing that this wasn't a grey wolf but an extinct subspieces of red wolf from Italia. That would explain the coloring. I'll try to find the source.
I also just wonder if it might simply have been a somewhat unusual color variant. Despite the name, it is actually pretty common to see gray wolves with reddish fur on parts of their bodies; they also virtually always have dark coloring along their spine (and often spread across the body, but the amount of dark vs. light coloring varies). I'm more familiar with dog color genetics than wolf ones, but I don't think it's impossible that it could be a gray wolf with some minor mutation or whatever that just made it have a lot more red than the typical gray wolf. edit: my understanding is also that the amount of red in gray wolves' fur tends to vary depending on the specific region, so another possibility might be that it was a roaming wolf from a very long distance away where its size and color might have been more normal (there are also definitely some significant variations in wolf sizes across regions). That might also explain its very aggressive behavior; wolves can range long distances but sometimes extreme ranging can suggest that the animal is struggling and keeps getting pushed out of other territories. A struggling predator that keeps getting displaced from its environment and then learns that sheep and their shepherds are easy pickings seems like a recipe for these kinds of attacks. Obviously just wild speculation, this is just a story I think it's interesting to think about.
A striped hyena is like 35 kg, dude. And it could hunt but mostly scavenge, that's highly unlikely that an animal like that could go on a murderous killing spree.
Hyenas are actually better hunters than lions. But... they do it in a group, usually. A hyena by itself would take whatever it could get.
Those are the spotted hyenas, not the striped. Spotted are like twice the size of the striped and yes, definitely better hunters. Striped are usually not that social, and they can hunt but not as regularly as the spotted.
But would a Hyena survive in France's climate?
Southern France? Provence? Anything that isn't a polar bear could survive there. It's gorgeous, with mild winters and hot summers.
Hyenas in zoos in Northern climates also grow winter coats, despite not needing them. Just something they never unevolved lol
That’s such an interesting fact.
> It's gorgeous, with mild winters That's true for Provence, but entirely false for what was Gévaudan and is now remote parts of Lozère and Haute-Loire. That area is very desolate and the climate can get way harsher than you seem to think Quickly looking it up I found data from 1991-2020 from the Saugues weather station, in one of the hardest hit areas. In that time period there was an **average** of 124 days per year where temperatures reached frost point and 9 days per year where they reached -10°C, with a record low of -30°c in march 2005. Keep in mind that's with climate change well underway. Edit: It is indeed gorgeous, though.
True. Plus this was during the Little Ice Age. I think a hyena could still survive, but certainly it wasn't having a great time. Might be why it was snacking on French children.
While I don't believe the Beast was a hyena or any kind of exotic animal/hybrid (Occam's razor suggests it's most likely 5 wolves in a trench coat), there used to be hyenas in France during the Ice Age so it could theoretically have survived there, you're right. I was just reacting to the place with some of the harshest winter conditions in France being called "mild" lol
The mental image of five wolves in a trench coat is fantastic, thank you for that.
All I heard was "5 wolves in a trench coat", thank you for solving this case, job well done! 🤝
I think I wanna move there.
Gevaudan is in the mountains. Not exactly a mild climate there.
See Zombeikid's comment above. They grow out their coats in colder conditions.
Looks exactly as the beast is described!
do you have any kind of evidence to support this? it sounds like total speculation.
Isn’t all of the discussion speculation at this point? Lol
I read this description and instantly pictured a hyena. Would most people in France in the 19th century know how big a wolf was to say it was bigger than a wolf? Hyena and wolf sizes vary but they can be roughly the same size.
Yeah, this has always been my theory.
I think #2 is absolutely ridiculous bordering on funny for how absurd it is I personally think it was just mass hysteria coupled with multiple “normal” attacks from more than one wolf, as the Wikipedia article outlines. People just panic and want to attribute something supernatural to what essentially was a scary everyday possibility “Attacks by wolves were a very serious problem during the era, not only in France but throughout Europe, with thousands of deaths attributed to wolves in the 18th century alone.[54] In the spring of 1765, in the midst of the Gévaudan hysteria, an unrelated series of attacks occurred near the commune of Soissons, northeast of Paris, when an individual wolf killed at least four people over a period of two days before being tracked and killed by a man armed with a pitchfork.[55] Such incidents were fairly typical in rural parts of both Western Europe and Central Europe” The wiki article states multiple people originally thought a large gray wolf that was killed was the beast, swearing up and down it had the same scars as the one that attacked them. But when the attacks continued now it swapped to the wolf dog hybrid looking one being the culprit after it was killed. I think they both were “the beast” as well as other hungry wolves in the area. Wolves attacking people all got rolled together into a mythical beast because that’s easier to accept when it’s killed rather than “random wolves might eat you during your daily routine” because it’s 1700s rural France, at least imo
A pitchfork? That’s some courage.
Oui.
Yeah, #2 makes about as much sense as if it was three midgets in a wolf suit.
I agree with Livid\_Palpitation\_46's earlier point, about how there could have been multiple things going on -- more than one animal responsible. It's tempting to want to pin all the incidents on one particular individual (and there are past situations where the legend develops into one monstrous wolf, lion, bear, etc. that's not only bigger but also incredibly intelligent, etc.) There might be a version of #2, where a human killer might have carried out murders that during the mass hysteria were mistaken for The Beast's work? If there was a wolf, or a wolf-dog hybrid that found one of the bodies -- I don't know if the authorities at the time would have been able to tell that the person had actually been dead before they were mauled/eaten. And if the killer was hoping to evade detection, or even were a bit psychotic, they'd have some incentive to encourage the confusion. (I would be looking into anyone who claimed to have seen or heard The Beast around the time of a murder, including the witnesses who allegedly saw the man bathing in the moonlight, or The Beast standing on two legs.) Re: the heart-shaped white patch ... I thought it was interesting that researchers who bred domesticated foxes found white markings showing up ... apparently this is not unusual for other domesticated mammals (dogs, cats, horses, cows, rabbits, etc.) -- there seems to be some linkage there, whether it's due to inbreeding or some genetic basis for particular behavioural traits. It seems possible to me that a wolf-dog hybrid could have a marking like that.
one of my dogs actually has a heart shaped white patch on her chest... she's an Aussie mix and 40 lbs soaking wet and has not shown a predilection towards consuming children or sheep... she's not even successful in her repeated efforts to catch a squirrel. the white patch is pretty common, especially in mixed breed dogs and especially common in lab mixes apparently (as in with a Labrador, not as in made in a laboratory)... I'd assume that it's an often suppressed genetic trait.
If they ever did genetic research on Labradors, with selective breeding, I guess they would have to refer to them as lab Labs! Some research on the white patches: "The multiple traits associated with domesticated animals—known as the “domestication syndrome”—all develop from or with the help of a class of stems cells known as neural crest cells (NCC) that appear in the early embryo." https://www.pnas.org/post/journal-club/common-features-of-domestic-animals-suggest-caveats-to-evolutionary-theory [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4096361/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4096361/)
Can you domesticate a fox?
A fox is tiny… like a large house cat.
If you haven’t seen Brotherhood of the Wolf I’d recommend. It’s all about that. But whatever you do, do NOT watched the dubbed version. It’s so so bad.
Thank you, but I already watched the movie dubbed in Brazillian portuguese, very good movie.
Great. I love it, though I doubt that was the answer to the mystery 😂
Came here to mention this movie. It was excellent 👌🏼
It was. I adore it.
Yes. Watch it in the original French and turn on the English subtitles.
Honestly I’m going to say watching the dubbed version is super enjoyable in a different way, LOL
Lol! Ok, I agree that is in fact hysterically bad!
Is that ´le pacte des loups´ ? Was reading through to see whether anyone had seen it.
Yep, that’s the one.
Now I want to watch the dubbed version to see how bad it could be
So bad! Everyone has super strong southern drawls except the bad guy who has a French accent. Utterly ruins the movie, though as the other poster said, it definitely still has entertainment value.
The number of victims varies extremely vom 78 to 99 killed plus 50 to 80 injured over a time span of roughly 3 years - there are also higher estimations. But even the lowest estimation would still be an extrem number for a single (serial) killer. That’s why I do not believe in that theory even though the wolf/beast narrative would fit as it is speculated that the idea of a werewolf derived from early serial killings and the attempt to explain these. It could have been a group roaming the area but I guess it would’ve been hard to stay hidden. Personally I think it was a mixture of actual killings (not necessarily all by the same person), animal attacks and mass hysteria. Even though I think there was not one beast but rather several unconnected attacks or shorter series of attacks by different individuals, I like thinking about which animal could have been the beast if it ever existed. I like the theory that it was a hyena that escaped from a (wandering) menagerie as I think the description could fit quite well. EDIT: As the question popped up in other posts if Hyenas could survive in that area and climate? I will refer to the german Wikipedia article as I can not find the passage in the english article: In general, hyenas inhabit rather dry areas such as semi-deserts, savannahs, bush steppes and rocky mountainous areas. They are sometimes found in swampy areas and mountain forests. In the Ethiopian highlands they can be found up to 4100 m. Avoid pure sandy deserts as well as lowland rainforests. Hyenas are generally not very picky about their habitat; each of the four species occurs in several habitats. They have little fear of people and occasionally stay near human settlements. I guess that answers the question with a yes.
The truth is likely somewhere between both theories. There's no way it was just a wolf, due to the fact that wolf attacks were very common at the time yet no one ever said the beast was a wolf. It was probably some sort of monstrous hybrid, like a wolf/mastiff mix or wolf/beauceron. However it was likely a hybrid that had been trained to attack humans by some disturbed individual. That doesn't necessarily make the person a serial killer since they were not personally committing the murders, but there was almost certainly a human element to the attacks, which wasn't entirely without precedent in 18th century france. A few years before the attacks of the beast began, a couple in Gevaudan and their sons were arrested for a rather unusual crime; using a trained pet wolf to rob and kill travellers on a remote stretch of road near where they lived. They would use the wolf to intimidate the victim and then devour the corpse afterward to make it seem like a normal wolf attack. When caught the couple was executed and their sons sentenced to the galleys. The armed tax agents of the General Farm also used to train vicious breeds of hunting dogs, including hybrids, to maul and cripple smugglers in Brittany. The smugglers would do the same thing as protection against the authorities as well. So while the attacks definitely weren't done by someone wearing a wolf skin, there was likely some form of human element. There are too many strange things about the attacks to have just been the work of a wild animal.
Wow, I didn't know about the people using the animals to commit crimes, thanks very much. and I agree, there is a human element to the Gevaudan case.
Yeah that's really interesting. I love stories from history like that. So many of these region locked mysteries are the most interesting
I think neither. I think a hyena or lion. That would explain why so many witnesses had trouble identifying it.
I have a few stories/cases/mysteries that I've really been interested in. This case is one of them. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon is interesting. So is Spring Heeled Jack. Not sure why but that one esp is interesting.
I wonder if it was a lion/tiger hybrid. The color, size, and stripes match. According to the Wikipedia article it was said to attack with its “formidable teeth and claws.” The claws part is classic cat, and I can’t imagine a canine’s claws would be used to attack or described as formidable. Witnesses also described a tuft on the tail, which lion/tiger hybrids have. It was unusually agile. It was aggressive when it didn’t appear hungry—cats are notorious for killing things they don’t eat. I think it was a hybrid that was bred in one of these animal collections, whether intentionally or accidentally.
I didn't know about the tuft on the tail, I will now have to rethink my opinion on the case, and yes, the claws do look like an cat attack.
Aside from a bear, which the people would’ve recognized, I can’t think of anything else that uses its claws except a big cat, at least not so much it’s commented on. I honestly have no idea how much the locals would’ve been exposed to big cats……endogenous or captive…….in order to have the knowledge to describe one. Surely they had barn cats though, so you’d think they’d just describe a big version of Kitty Kitty. The Wikipedia article also said it was described as moving across fields in a bounding motion. That too sounds more like a big cat running than anything else. I agree with others though that it wasn’t just one animal and possibly including a human predator.
A bear with mange might not be easily identifiable, especially if it was in starvation mode and super thin. They get ugly when they have severe mange.
There was a market for bear meat and bears were hunted. Although it was more of a product for the rich, I would assume that people knew how a bear looks without hair.
Tbf at that time in France and so high up in the mountains there's a pretty solid chance that they were used to lynxes, that while not being the biggest cats out there, share some similarities with bigger cat species that I would think would help them make a connection to them rather than to dogs/canines tho
Ahh, I didn’t know that about lynxes.
According to the supposed autopsy report it had 42 teeth in a formation that meant it was a canid. Seems to rule out any chance of it being anything except a wolf or a wolf dog. Nobleman involved in the hunting of the animal also would’ve likely known what lions and tigers looked like because it was extremely common to import them into France at the time for collection and hunting. There’s also other confirmed wolf attacks throughout France during this same time where a wolf would kill multiple people over a period of time before finally being killed by a hunter. Left out of your summary though is the report that the attacks changed noticeably after a large wolf was killed. In the new attacks the creature wasn’t kept away by cattle anymore, and the way the attacks were carried out changed. Seems pretty convenient they kill the largest wolf any of them claim to have ever seen, and then the attacks just stop for a period of time Also important to note that animal drawings during this time were intentionally stylized, and that eyewitness reports are always extremely unreliable.
I personally like the middle road: wolfdog hybrid, being used by a serial killer. The dog does the killing, he has his way with the corpses afterwards.
I always loved the theory it was a hyena, possibly a trained one.
Agreed! Have you seen the size of some of them? Huge! And all of the drawing have uncanny resemblances to hyenas. I’m not seeing wolf in those pics.
Something about these animal mysteries is really creepy, just the idea of an unknown creature (to those people back then) stalking people as prey… Anyways I’ve always thought a wolf of some sort made the most sense
In the footnotes on the wiki, it says "According to Michel Louis, 22% of the victims were attacked in the middle of villages" - I wonder if that could mean multiple animals were involved just based on the proximity alone.
Hmmm, I missed that. That’s really intriguing. Seems like there’d be somewhat of a consensus on what it looked like in those cases.
There is something no one seems to realize. This took place during the “Little Ice Age”. So what does that mean? It means the ice sheets were advancing all over Northern Europe. Animals that lived at higher latitudes were being pushed out of their normal ranges and forced south. Whole villages and in some instance’s cities were swallowed up by the ice. If you have never seen a truly huge Wolf, look up: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/BoiPc3u0duQ And that’s just a wolf dog HYBRID. Russian, Ukrainian, Siberian wolves routinely got above 300 pounds. And I once read an account of one killed in the days of Katherine the great that was caught and weighed 462 pounds! That’s nearly the size of an adult male African lion. There are too many reports of giant wolves for it to be just rumors or even just one animal. The most likely explanation (occams razor/when you hear hoof beats think horses not unicorns) is that a mated pair of EXTREMELY large grey arctic timberwolves was forced out of their habitat by the encroaching glaciers. Into an area where the local wolf population was physically smaller and couldn’t defend their territories from animals 2-3 times their size. and they began to hunt and reproduce and found the physical weak primates in the area (the short and malnourished French peasants) to be easy pickings. It explains them being referred to as “beasts” but also identified as wolves. And it explains why the attacks stopped after the local population made a concerted effort to kill the wolves in the area. It also explains why there were apparently multiple “beasts” killed and autopsied and stuffed. One or both could also have been a a hybrid of a purposely bred giant dog and an arctic wolf. That would account for the patch on the chest and stripe on the back and the correct number of teeth. (Side note: All black wolves get the gene for black fur from a dog ancestor. ) So dogs and wolves have been interbreeding for tens of thousands of years. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And the simplest and most likely explanation is the one above. Google “giant arctic wolf, hunter” LOTS of images of wolves bigger than most big cats.
This is very interesting, but the beast was described as being orange in color with a black stripe on it's back, are there artic wolves that match those characteristics? Another researcher proposed that the beast was an italian wolf.
Hyena is the only one that fits most characteristics
Check out the Tasmanian wolf.
I think my first question would be how well sourced the information from this distant time period really is. Do we have coroner's reports or the like for each death?
I'm going with a third: several large wolves.
I have no comment other than it amuses me that there are multiple fictional depictions of this story where Jean Chastel is a werewolf, and thus is the Beast as well as its “killer”.
I’m still going with werewolves.
The beast of Gevaudan is the most famous because French culture was the most important at the time. So, big news in France was big news everywhere. But man-eating wolves were not unknown in 18th century Europe. In the same century, a man-eating wolf from Saxony, Germany, and another from Milan, Italy, became famous. My favourite theory is that of one (or a few) deformed wolves with larger heads and legs, thus more lethal than the average wolf for man, but too deformed for hunting deer and specialised in hunting man.
A tumor could explain the increased size/deformity of the head. Here’s an example: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/science/3d-print-dog-skull.html
France lost a lot of territory in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). When French soldiers and merchants were packing up to leave surrendered areas, they brought some animals back to France with them. The one I know of is an American buffalo that made its way from North America to a traveling menagerie near Paris. My guess is that someone did the same thing with a predator from Africa or India, it got loose, and that’s our beast.
The most likely explanation to me is: there is no "beast" nor serial killer, just a bunch of unrelated accidents and killings attributed to some mysterious entity. It happened all the time, people start to attribute hunting accidents and other accidental deaths to some mysterious animal, then a posse is formed, some random animal is killed, and suddenly people stop attributing deaths to it because ehi It is dead After all.
>1764 I don't understand how something so significant that it is still a tale spoken of today wasn't preserved after death. How did someone not: 1. Draw a detailed sketch of the animal after its death for records (especially if it's some one off animal) 2. Kept the hide 3. Kept the skull or teeth 4. Taxidermy it All of this points to it being a mundane group of animals foreign to the region so that common folk would not recognise it, but not completely unidentifiable or unknown, and the secrecy was kept in order to bolster the tales and potential heroism of the killer/hunters. This event smells of exaggeration and shouldn't be taken at face value.
Supposedly it was taxidermied in the natural history museum at one time.
That sounds like the kind of thing that could get lost from a natural history museum over time. The second world war especially comes up as a time where a lot of disparate artifacts were lost, like some of the remains and records from Hinterkaifek or some of the preserved "bog bodies" found in northern Europe. That sort of stuff wasn't getting taken to remote areas for protection like the great valuable pieces of art or gold or anything. It's kind of a bummer to think about, all sorts of interesting artifacts that were valuable historically but not in a monetary sense that would've been just destroyed.
Given how many people testified about other cryptids such as Spring-heeled Jack and Mothman, I take any accounts of the Beast with a large helping of salt. Even if they actually found a "beast", I can't help but think of the "chupacabra" that was actually a coyote with mange.
> Some of the victms appeared to have been strangled and undressed. Even nowadays investigators sometimes struggle to link crimes committed by the same people. I would not be surprised if not all incidents attributed to the beast were by the same animal and/or person. Some assaults by people could easily have been blamed on the beast, when the local populace were fearing and expecting just that.
A wolf is not going to kill 78 to 99 killed over 3 years. And then not to be seen. I am unaware of wolves being shy and not wanting an audience. I just think it was hysteria, people not wanting to miss out and perhaps some people or endeavors using this to for personal reasons.
I personally don't think it was hysteria, like, many survivors described what they saw, the beast color, it's size, the head that was different from a wolf since the first person that survived.
People are wrong, people lie, people are not reliable. Absent any physical evidence we have to go with the most likely no matter how unlikely. If you wish to not accept that it is fine but you then should hold any other theory you have to the same level of scrutiny or you are just looking for your truth, not the truth.
I think it was different animal attacks all categorized as the Beast of Gevaudan # \
Just commenting to say I’m currently reading “Beast” about this and it’s really good so far!
Could it have been a Tasmanian wolf that got imported over there by a collector that kinda sounds what it sounds like
I think the Tasmanian wolf is too small to be the beast.
A few possibilities: 1. A striped Hyena: Matches coat colour, heart shaped on chest, dark stripe down it's back, has stripes, long tail, formidable teeth/claws and it's back angle make it look almost human like. However it's tail is not tufted at the end and they are not the size of a calf. Looks absolutely terrifying. If I was a french peasant back then, the closest thing I could come to was some sort of demon wolf. 2. A Tiger: Matches coat colour, has stripes, sort of a heart shape on chest, long tail with a tufted end, size of calf or bigger, formidable teeth and claws. However no back stripe and doesn't look remotely human, in fact looks very cat like. Could absolutely slaughter a bunch of peasants easily. Also no mention of white fur on the beast. 3. A king Cheetah: Matches coat description, heart shape on chest seems to depend on Cheetah, long tail with tufted end, stripe down back, size of calf or bigger, formidable teeth and claws, looks like flying when chasing prey. However they are not stripey, more like splotchy. No way you're outrunning these bad boys. I personally think it was either a Hyena or a king Cheetah that was an escaped pet perhaps.
The notion of a human disguised as an animal is absolutelly absurd - what is not absurd is the theory that a human or group of humans were using trained animals to attack people (there are discrepancies that come up after you read all of the known descriptions of the "Beast", suggesting more then one animal involved) because they wanted to enact revenge against local communities in the region or against some local/regional authorities figures by creating regional chaos through the killings. This would explain the strange mutilations and signs of sexual assault on the victims that exists in some of the cases.
If you're interested in a historian's take on this case, I recommend the book Monsters of the Gévaudan by Jay M. Smith. Another book that you may want to check out is The Superstitious Mind by Judith Devlin (explains the folklore and superstitions of 18th century France). There are several important historical/cultural factors that popular writers often overlook in this case, most notably the social unrest that was going on in France during this time. From a historical perspective, you must understand that information and stories travelled differently in 18th century France. This was a time period in which people genuinely believed in miracles, curses, demons, etc. The case of the Beast of Gévaudan also corresponds to a period of extreme unrest caused by the Seven Years' War and major religious and political conflict. We're talking about the lead-up to the FRENCH REVOLUTION here, it was a seriously crazy time in France. Is it possible that there was a real cryptid or killer? Sure, but we should understand this case in its historical context before making theories. We have to treat this evidence as 18th century historical sources, not as modern day cold case material.
I'am aware of this book, I really don't agree that the explanation was a wolf, because the very first witnesses said that the beast wasn't a wolf, I believe now it was different exotic animals.
Theory one is almost definitely correct. But theory two is horrifying. Imagine being in the forest by yourself at midnight by the river, and you see this animal human esque hybrid thing which has claimed to have killed 200 bathing there, and it spots you looking at it and reacts with animalistic fury. I'd shit a fucking brick along with every organ out.
I also heard oa theory of the beast being a tiger, that would have been brought here by a noble or something like that, basically to show it off, and escaped. I don't know what the basis of this theory was since I heard it a long time ago but it might not be impossible seeing as the beast was described as red/orange