- Joined
- Dec 7, 2005
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- 457
OldTimeRadio said:There were at least ELEVEN "Beast" attacks in France over a period of 236 years. These resulted in a minimum of 350 fatalities plus at least 100 surviving eye- and teeth-witnesses.
But never before has anybody even so much as whispered the "bear" word.
I'm not saying that bears were responsible for all the 'Beast' attacks over 236 years, infact, over a period of time like that and the amount of fatalities involved, I'd be very surprised if they were all caused by the same thing simply from a law of averages point of view.
Wolves and maybe feral dogs were almost cirtainly responsible for some of the cases and maybe some of them were murders blamed on the beast. Pigs, both feral and wild, could have been responsible for some as well, but the ones where the beast was reported as being the size of a cow had to be bears. It's the only living predatory creature in the area (infact in the entire world) big enough to fit the discription.
Well, seeing as how no one thought to ask anyone if they knew what a bear looked like when they were writing the original reports and we don't have a time machine to go back and ask them ourselves, a bit of speculation is in order.And for the bear theory to work we have to FIRST establish that nobody in the south of France had any idea of what bears look like. That's NOT been done.
Firstly, remember we are talking about a long time ago, before the days when everyone knew what a bear looked like becausethey had seen a picture of one in a book (infact in those days, quite often the only book in most housholds was The Bible as books were very expensive to buy) or on the T.V. or on the internet. Yes, there were people who had performing bears who travelled with fairs and suchlike but also remember that the only transport available was horse driven, if the fair didn't come close enough to the place where you lived, then you simply didn't go and anyway, we are talking about farming communities here are we not? In those days (and even today to a cirtain extent) the only time a farming family took time off was to go to church on a Sunday. Infact, I went to a rural area of France for a holiday a few years ago and in the village I was staying, it was estimated that at least half of the population had never travelled more than 10 miles away in their entire lives, and that's in today's modern times with modes of transport like trains, buses, cars, motorbikes, airoplanes, ect.
We also know that people generaly avoided areas of woodland and wilderness where they could have spotted bears because there was also wolves and wild boar which are both extremely dangerous animals.
Put these facts together with the fact that bears are naturaly shy of humans and tend to avoid us and that people today live in areas populated by bears and still never see one in their entire lives and we come to the conclusion that probably most of the people in the areas we're talking about wouldn't know a bear if it slapped them in the face with a wet fish.
Secondly, as Pietro_Mercurios kindly pointed out, if the local bear population had something like mange, which is a proven possibility as my last post shows, then they might not even be recognisable as a bear to someone who has actualy seen one before.
Thirdly, if it was some kind of survivor from prehistoric times, and especialy if there was a breeding population of them lasting over 236 years, then some sort of remains would have probably been found by now. France isn't like The Americas or Africa where thousands upon thousands of miles of wilderness and forest and jungle are still completely unexplored and could hide a completely new species of giant predator known to science y'know.
The basic fact of this case remains though that we'll probably never know for sure what was responsible for these killings, but we can work out what would be the likeliest suspect based on eye witnessed accounts and we know that when someone describes a cow sized predator, there are only bears that grow anywhere near the size that it would need to be.