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The Beast Of Gévaudan

blessmycottonsocks said:
The Dark Histories podcast didn't describe any such attacks, but Ben did say the beast appeared wary of cattle and had been chased away by oxen on a couple of occasions.
I'm fairly convinced that it was a series of wolf, wolf-dog hybrid and the occasional wild boar attack that gave rise to the legend.
The creature Chastel shot was very likely a wolf-dog hybrid he had bred himself for its size and hunting abilities. Whilst he didn't receive the full reward he was expecting, due to the king's hunter already having bagged that for killing a huge wolf, Chastel still gained a sizeable recompense and became a local folk hero, which probably made him feel that killing one of his own prized hybrid animals had been worthwhile.
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There are some great books on the subject that details accounts taken at the time.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gévaudan-T...=tragedy+of+the+gevaudan,stripbooks,95&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beast-Were...refix=beast+of+gevaudan,stripbooks,163&sr=1-4
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
The Dark Histories podcast didn't describe any such attacks, but Ben did say the beast appeared wary of cattle and had been chased away by oxen on a couple of occasions.
I'm fairly convinced that it was a series of wolf, wolf-dog hybrid and the occasional wild boar attack that gave rise to the legend.
The creature Chastel shot was very likely a wolf-dog hybrid he had bred himself for its size and hunting abilities. Whilst he didn't receive the full reward he was expecting, due to the king's hunter already having bagged that for killing a huge wolf, Chastel still gained a sizeable recompense and became a local folk hero, which probably made him feel that killing one of his own prized hybrid animals had been worthwhile.
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Wolves simply don't kill in the way the beast did. The don't roar, they don't have long tails with a tassel on the end. They don't kill with claws. One women who tried to rescue her son that the beast had in her jaws. She leapt on it's back and tried to squeeze it's balls. She said it was a donkey it was the size of a donkey and she rode it in the struggle. It scalped her with it's claws and killed the boy. That's not any kind of canid.
 
lordmongrove said:
Wolves simply don't kill in the way the beast did. The don't roar, they don't have long tails with a tassel on the end. They don't kill with claws. One women who tried to rescue her son that the beast had in her jaws. She leapt on it's back and tried to squeeze it's balls. She said it was a donkey it was the size of a donkey and she rode it in the struggle. It scalped her with it's claws and killed the boy. That's not any kind of canid.
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That raises a few issues. Firstly, perhaps Ben from Dark Histories was slightly selective in which accounts of the attacks he used? He does state at the start of the podcast though that his references were the original French reports, rather than any bastardised and sensationalised second or third-hand accounts.
Next, your account reinforces the hypothesis that there was no single beast, but a series of attacks perpetrated by different animals. If the woman described the animal as a donkey, I suspect it was a donkey. The following video shows how aggressive donkeys can be and states that they used to be kept to protect livestock from wolf or wild dog attacks. If a country woman, familiar with the local fauna says donkey, then I'm willing to believe her. Donkeys are, of course, herbivores and wouldn't kill for meat, but they sure as hell could cause some serious wounds, especially on a child. If the creature was rabid (rabies was widespread in continental Europe at the time) then it would act with enormous ferocity.


Attacks leagues apart on or around the same time throughout the Lozère region suggest strongly that an entire menagerie had become opportunist man-hunters. Wolves naturally, specially bred or inadvertent wolf-dog hybrids, wild boar and now I'll add at least one feral and possibly rabid donkey to the mix. I'm not saying that an ABC is completely impossible, just that Occam's razor demands we consider more plausible explanations, such as those proffered by the Dark Histories podcast.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
That raises a few issues. Firstly, perhaps Ben from Dark Histories was slightly selective in which accounts of the attacks he used? He does state at the start of the podcast though that his references were the original French reports, rather than any bastardised and sensationalised second or third-hand accounts.
Next, your account reinforces the hypothesis that there was no single beast, but a series of attacks perpetrated by different animals. If the woman described the animal as a donkey, I suspect it was a donkey. The following video shows how aggressive donkeys can be and states that they used to be kept to protect livestock from wolf or wild dog attacks. If a country woman, familiar with the local fauna says donkey, then I'm willing to believe her. Donkeys are, of course, herbivores and wouldn't kill for meat, but they sure as hell could cause some serious wounds, especially on a child. If the creature was rabid (rabies was widespread in continental Europe at the time) then it would act with enormous ferocity.


Attacks leagues apart on or around the same time throughout the Lozère region suggest strongly that an entire menagerie had become opportunist man-hunters. Wolves naturally, specially bred or inadvertent wolf-dog hybrids, wild boar and now I'll add at least one feral and possibly rabid donkey to the mix. I'm not saying that an ABC is completely impossible, just that Occam's razor demands we consider more plausible explanations, such as those proffered by the Dark Histories podcast.
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Hi again, no she said it was as large as a donkey, she straddled it trying to save her son which it was trying to eat.. At the time the rich upper classes had allot of private zoos on the estates of French chateaus. There was even a big market that sold imported exotic animals. The Beast of Gevaudan is just the most well known case outside of France. There were many other 'beasts' loose in the 18th and early 19th century France, including one at Limousin.
 
lordmongrove said:
Hi again, no she said it was as large as a donkey, she straddled it trying to save her son which it was trying to eat.. At the time the rich upper classes had allot of private zoos on the estates of French chateaus. There was even a big market that sold imported exotic animals. The Beast of Gevaudan is just the most well known case outside of France. There were many other 'beasts' loose in the 18th and early 19th century France, including one at Limousin.
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Fair enough. I guess, 260 years after the events, we'll never know for sure which animal(s) carried out the attacks and all we can do is speculate (which is fun mind you!).
 
chicorea said:
And it's also remarkable how frequent are the descriptions of a huge red and striped canid, different of a wolf.
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Was thinking about this in relation to the Bengal Tiger, by way of the famous Tipu's Tiger. Though that particular automaton was built later than the Gévaudan attacks, apparently it was only one of a series - similar in theme - made earlier than the 1790s. Tipu Sultan himself 'closely collaborated with French troops', as it happens.
 
Frideswide said:
This is something that occurred to me. But I don't want it to be true!
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Hmmm. I'm not going to elevate the ideas of a novelist, an artist, and a physical therapist on a hobby podcast over that of historians who have actually studied the records. This is why YouTube is a bad thing. Some arguments are just NOT worth the same as others.
 
Sharon Hill said:
Hmmm. I'm not going to elevate the ideas of a novelist, an artist, and a physical therapist on a hobby podcast over that of historians who have actually studied the records. This is why YouTube is a bad thing. Some arguments are just NOT worth the same as others.
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An escaped lion doesn’t seem that outrageous a suggestion. Many of the descriptions say it wasn’t a wolf, & people living in the area would’ve been familiar with wolves. It seems to have been an unusual creature which people couldn’t readily identify. What do historians have to say about it?
 
hunck said:
An escaped lion doesn’t seem that outrageous a suggestion. Many of the descriptions say it wasn’t a wolf, & people living in the area would’ve been familiar with wolves. It seems to have been an unusual creature which people couldn’t readily identify. What do historians have to say about it?
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I'm not saying it's impossible. Could be. But the evidence doesn't exist to even get close to confirming it. Same goes for the hyena idea.

The descriptions range from wolf to hyena, not consistently like a lion. The data for Gevaudan is so old now, incomplete, exaggerated, and degraded. We can almost certainly say all the deaths were not from just one or a small collection of causes.

My point was that I'm not going to put any stock into three guys BSing on their hobbyist podcast. It's a pet peeve of mine that there is so much media content by people who present themselves as credible experts, but who have established no credibility at all. Anyone can post anything, saying what they want, but I prefer to be more discerning when it comes to considering complex subjects like this one. These guys didn't do much to inform their opinions.
 
I think there was enough going on at the time for us to be confident that there was some sort of beast. However, we only need to look at cases of mass hysteria worldwide to know that once a "beast has struck" (metaphorical, literal, imaginary, or real) the beast will always be reported by other people, with embellished descriptions.

At the time, rural people were familiar with the appearance of wolves, wild dogs, wild boar, bears, and so on. However, we all know that once someone has reported seeing an unusually large specimen of a predator, someone else will see an even bigger one, and so on. Once the reports get "fancifully large", other fanciful details (glowing eyes and stuff) are likely to be added.

The beast was reported as being various sizes up to and including donkey-sized, or even small horse-sized. That does not mean it was that big really.

Two things that stand out: the suggestion that it killed with its claws (wolves don't do this), and the suggestion that it had a furry tassel on the end of its tail.

Wolves and dogs attack only with their teeth. Wild boar charge at you. Large cats also mainly attack with the teeth, but they can also strike with their claws.

Bears can also attack with their claws. We have all seen the online photos of the bald/mangy bear that does not look like a bear. A sick bear, unable to hunt normally, could conceivably have taken to attacking humans.

However, that tassel on the long tail doesn't fit a bear, or indeed a wolf or dog or wild boar. It sounds more feline.

My question, though, is how much attention I would pay to the fluff on the end of its tail if I were seeking to escape a large and aggressive predator. Was this just a detail added for effect?

Furthermore, we know that there would also be people killed by wolves, dogs, bandits, and murderers, and it is likely that some of these "ordinary" (for the time) deaths may have been erroneously attributed to the beast, once the existence of the beast was widely acknowledged. This would distort the anecdotal and even the "forensic" evidence for the way that the beast behaved.

We will never know, but I think there was definitely something unusual that caused some of the deaths. There is no good reason why it should not have been an escaped or released big cat, but no clear evidence that it was.
 
I know very little about this case, but I do know how bad even what appears to be accademic historical research can be, and that is really very bad at times. As a result, one thing I always ask is what access is there to the primary evidence.

I know nothing about this but the basic premise, that an unusual beast was responsible for a large number of deaths in 18th century France. To me, that sounds very unlikely to be the true explanation for the source of this story.
 
Sharon Hill said:
I'm not saying it's impossible. Could be. But the evidence doesn't exist to even get close to confirming it. Same goes for the hyena idea.

The descriptions range from wolf to hyena, not consistently like a lion. The data for Gevaudan is so old now, incomplete, exaggerated, and degraded. We can almost certainly say all the deaths were not from just one or a small collection of causes.

My point was that I'm not going to put any stock into three guys BSing on their hobbyist podcast. It's a pet peeve of mine that there is so much media content by people who present themselves as credible experts, but who have established no credibility at all. Anyone can post anything, saying what they want, but I prefer to be more discerning when it comes to considering complex subjects like this one. These guys didn't do much to inform their opinions.
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Short of finding the supposedly buried remains there’s going to be no proof or conformation of anything so it’s all speculation.

A lot of conflicting descriptions doesn’t help. The 3 guys in the video aren’t the first to suggest lion. It’s a possibility but nothing more.
 
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