The Beast Of Gévaudan

[QuaziWashboard]

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.

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.

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.
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.

 

[Leaferne]

*sudden thought* Surely cows might have been a bit smaller in those days? I know horses were. What I mean is, perhaps instead of picturing an animal the size of a VW Jetta, we're looking at an Austin Mini instead.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Firstly, remember we are talking about a long time ago....

We have quite a different historical orientation here and it probably interferes with our discussion. You regard the 1760s as "a long time ago" while I think of that decade as modern times - a mere 90 years, for example, before the laying of the Trans-Atlantic telegraph cable.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

We have quite a different historical orientation here and it probably interferes with our discussion. You regard the 1760s as "a long time ago" while I think of that decade as modern times - a mere 90 years, for example, before the laying of the Trans-Atlantic telegraph cable.

It was 240 years ago, y'know....nearly a quarter of a millenium. It was 30 years before the invention of the bicycle, 122 years before Edison invented the electric light bulb, 136 years before the first petrol driven automobile, 159 years before The Great War (WW1)

 

[QuaziWashboard]

What I'm saying is that even though it wasn't that long before the onset of modern technology it was still BEFORE. They didn't even have steam tractors on farms in those days and people who worked on farms worked practicaly every hour of daylight available because most of it was done by hand. Travel was very limited and most people, especially farm workers, were still pretty much uneducated or at best, educated at home.....and bears were still the only predators that could be described as 'as big as a cow.'

Also, Leaferne is quite correct, most domesticated cattle was quite a bit smaller then, before the onset of modern breeding programs, feed designed to add bulk and drugs such as steroids, so bears WOULD have infact been nearer the size of a 1700s cow than they would be today.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

It was 240 years ago, y'know....nearly a quarter of a millenium. It was 30 years before the invention of the bicycle, 122 years before Edison invented the electric light bulb, 136 years before the first petrol driven automobile, 159 years before The Great War (WW1)

But that's the point. To me it's ONLY 240 years ago, ONLY 120 years before the birth of my beloved grandmother.

I'm reminded of the woman who leaves a party with her husband and complains "I certainly wish you'd begin telling people that we've been married for 25 years and NOT a quarter of a century!"

 

[Leaferne]

OK, I think we're reading the Bible for its prose here.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

It was 240 years ago, y'know....nearly a quarter of a millenium. It was 30 years before the invention of the bicycle, 122 years before Edison invented the electric light bulb, 136 years before the first petrol driven automobile, 159 years before The Great War (WW1)

But that's the point. To me it's ONLY 240 years ago, ONLY 120 years before the birth of my beloved grandmother.

I'm reminded of the woman who leaves a party with her husband and complains "I certainly wish you'd begin telling people that we've been married for 25 years and NOT a quarter of a century!"

Yes, but there's been more technological advances made in the last 240 years than any other period of 240 years in history, but my point was that it doesn't matter if it was 240 years ago or yesterday, bears are still the only predators big enough to be described as 'as big as a cow.'
The fact that it was 240 years ago, before most people, especially people who lived and worked in remote farming areas, had the means to be educated, only helps explain why none of the eye witnesses recognised it as a bear.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

ears are still the only predators big enough to be described as 'as big as a cow.'

Am I correct in assuming that you are ruling out any possibility of a paranormal or cryptozoologicasl erxplanation? I'm not yet completely ready to go that route.

And we STILL have not yet established how common or rare bears were in the Gauvedan in the 1770s. Everything depends on that.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

Am I correct in assuming that you are ruling out any possibility of a paranormal or cryptozoologicasl erxplanation? I'm not yet completely ready to go that route.

And we STILL have not yet established how common or rare bears were in the Gauvedan in the 1770s. Everything depends on that.

Obviously as a Fortean with an open mind, I can't rule out anything but c'mon, let's be realistic here, why would anyone look for a paranormal or cryptozoological explanation when there's a perfectly good, real, known to science creature, that fits the discriptions, living in the area, at the time of the events?

Nobody knows how many bears there were in the area in the 1700s because nobody bothered to go out and count them and write it down at the time, but what we do know is that Gevaudan is local to the French Alps, which definately had a Brown Bear population until around 1937. (which in itself is quite interesting. What killed them off? Could it have been a disease?)

I really can't see though why you feel it's so important to establish how many bears were in the area in the 1700s. Surely it's enough just to know that bears were in the area then, which we have now definately established. After all Tigers are rare but attacks on people by them are still well documented.

By the way, just to give you an idea on how remote and rural Gevaudan is, in a radius of 7km from Gevaudan, the population today is just 560.

 

[Quake42]

It's worth remembering that the European brown bear, as well as being extremely shy (attacks on humans are almost unknown) is relatively small. Unlike a grizzly or kodiak bear I think it would really struggle to crush a human head in its jaws.

I don't think that the Beast was a bear. Even if the locals were unfamiliar with it, the various sets of professional hunters who tracked it and saw it would have known what a bear looked like.

The whole thing is a mystery. My money is probably on a foreign import like a lion though.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

It's worth remembering that the European brown bear, as well as being extremely shy (attacks on humans are almost unknown) is relatively small. Unlike a grizzly or kodiak bear I think it would really struggle to crush a human head in its jaws.

I don't think that the Beast was a bear. Even if the locals were unfamiliar with it, the various sets of professional hunters who tracked it and saw it would have known what a bear looked like.

The whole thing is a mystery. My money is probably on a foreign import like a lion though.

Do you think that there would be enough lions or any other foreign import to provide a breeding population so that the attacks could keep happening over quite a few generations?
European brown bears may be smaller than their North American relatives, but they are still a damn sight bigger than a wolf, still use the same hunting technique of crushing their prey with their front legs and body weight and still the only known predatory creature in the area that comes anywhere near the size of a cow.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

But if bears were known in the Gevaudan, why did not a single one of the many survivors report "I was attacked by a bear"?

Had that been the case the King's Hunters would have searched for bears and NOT wolves.

 

[Quake42]

But if bears were known in the Gevaudan, why did not a single one of the many survivors report "I was attacked by a bear"?

Had that been the case the King's Hunters would have searched for bears and NOT wolves.

Agreed. The bear theory is superficially attractive but it doesn't make sense that none of the witnesses - including professional hunters who saw the creature - identified it as such.

European bears are, as I say, surprisingly small. Not cow sized. And not aggressive unless cornered.

Do you think that there would be enough lions or any other foreign import to provide a breeding population so that the attacks could keep happening over quite a few generations?

I agree this aspect seems odd, but who knows? Wealthy individuals did have private menageries throught the period.

The alternative is some genuinely cryptozoological episode - the description of the Beast matches a couple of prehistoric mammals almost perfectly, but the likelihood of a mesonychid or similar surviving into modern times even in France, even in remote areas, seems vanishingly small.

Edit: just did a quick Google search on the Beast - there is less out there than I thought but one site makes the excellent point that the Beast had a long tail. If true, it makes an ursine identity even less likely.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

The alternative is some genuinely cryptozoological episode

That's the way my thoughts are currently running, either that or the truly demonic. But neither am I ruling out more mundane explanations.

Edit: just did a quick Google search on the Beast - there is less out there than I thought...

The majority of stuff is in French and uses the spelling "bete." I've saved most of this material in robot translations and time permitting I edit the texts into more readable form.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

Agreed. The bear theory is superficially attractive but it doesn't make sense that none of the witnesses - including professional hunters who saw the creature - identified it as such.

That's where the 'bears with mange' theory comes in. As the earlier photo of a black bear with mange shows us, it can affect the bears natural appearence quite dramaticaly

European bears are, as I say, surprisingly small. Not cow sized. And not aggressive unless cornered.

Male European brown bears are about two thirds the size of the large coastal brown bears of North America, that means that if an average coastal brown bear is about 900lb (they can range anything between 290-1,550lb) then European brown bears could be about 600lb which is still a big creature, put this together with the fact that domesticated cattle of today is roughly a third bigger than it was before scientists got involved in their breeding and feeding, and the two animals in the 1700s become a lot closer in size than you'd think.

As for aggressiveness, again the theory of bears with some sort of illness comes into play as a bear that's too ill to hunt natural prey could start preying on slower humans. It's something that's well documented other species.

I agree this aspect seems odd, but who knows? Wealthy individuals did have private menageries throughout the period.

I'm going to be cheeky now and use your own argument and quote against you... with a couple of slight changes.

'I don't think that the Beast was a "lion". Even if the locals were unfamiliar with it, the various sets of professional hunters who tracked it and saw it would have known what a "lion" looked like.'

Saying that, if you were a hunter searching the Alps area of France for an elusive 'beast' wouldn't you just kill the first large wolf you found, get your money and move on? It is recorded that the Kings own personal hunters were sent out to find the beast and kill it, so they probably wern't local hunters.

Another point I'd like to make is that if there were private menageries, they'd likely have North American brown bears in their collection purely because of their massive size. If one of these escaped into the Alps, it'd be more likely to survive in the wild and even breed with the local bear population, making bigger, more aggressive European brown bears.

The alternative is some genuinely cryptozoological episode - the description of the Beast matches a couple of prehistoric mammals almost perfectly, but the likelihood of a mesonychid or similar surviving into modern times even in France, even in remote areas, seems vanishingly small.

Agreed.

Edit: just did a quick Google search on the Beast - there is less out there than I thought but one site makes the excellent point that the Beast had a long tail. If true, it makes an ursine identity even less likely.

As I've mentioned earlier, the tail is the only thing that doesn't match up to bears, the rest being;

The massive size of the beast-----Bears are the biggest predator alive today.

Claws the size of a man's hand-----Brown bears claws on their front feet are about 5 inches long, much longer than a lion or tiger's claws or the claws of any other known predator.

One eye witness discribed a red coloured creature with a white mark on it's chest-----Red is one of the natural colour variations of brown bears and they are born with a white mark on their chest which often remains after the bear has reached adulthood.

The victims head's were crushed-----Brown bears have a technique of killing their prey by bringing all their body weight down on it with their front paws, on any four footed creature this would result in a broken spine but a human stands upright making the head the first thing to come into contact with the bears paws. Bears have also been known to swipe at it's prey's head, something that in North America is said to be able to stun a moose. On a human the damage from such a blow would be devastating.

Hyenas have been mentioned as a possible culprit-----Take a look at the picture of the hairless bear with mange on my earlier post, it really does look quite hyena-like.

As I said earlier, the tail is very puzzling but when you look at the rest of the evidence, can the tail be taken seriously? Remember these eye witness accounts took part during a frenzied attack on people. Mistakes could have been made.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

The alternative is some genuinely cryptozoological episode

That's the way my thoughts are currently running, either that or the truly demonic. But neither am I ruling out more mundane explanations.

Edit: just did a quick Google search on the Beast - there is less out there than I thought...

The majority of stuff is in French and uses the spelling "bete." I've saved most of this material in robot translations and time permitting I edit the texts into more readable form.

Well, before you decide that it was a demonic werewolf, or 'loup garou', that was predating the South of France 240 years ago, just remember Occam's Razor. There were wolves and there were bears in the region, at the time. Bears are bigger than wolves, although they're smaller than cows. Modern cows may be much larger than domesticated breeds in use, in France, at the time.

As pointed out and Quazi Washboard has quite clearly shown, a bear with mange does not necessarily look like a bear, but they are still bigger than a wolf.

Just imagine that thing rearing towards you, with slavering jaws, fangs bared and its huge paws full of claws! Still think you could keep a sense of objectivity and give an accurate estimate as to its size, or provenance?

Talking of slavering, foaming jaws, has anyone mentioned the possibility of a bear with mange and, or, rabies? Quite common in the region around that time, it was Louis Pasteur who developed the first effective cure, after all.

'Bete' is short for bête and the little 'ê' is to show that tidy minded, post-Revolutionary lexicographers removed the 's' that originally came after the 'e' at some point, since it was no longer pronounced by the French. The word would originally have been 'beste' , from the same root word as, 'beast'.

'The Brotherhood of the Wolf' is on Dutch TV channel: RTL7, tonight.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

Talking of slavering, foaming jaws, has anyone mentioned the possibility of a bear with mange and, or rabies? Very common in the region rabies, it was Louis Pasteur who developed the first effective cure, after all.

That's a good point and would explain the hightened aggression from a European brown bear and as mange weakens the imuno-defence system this would leave the bear more likely to catch a secondary disease.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Talking of slavering, foaming jaws, has anyone mentioned the possibility of a bear with mange and, or rabies? Very common in the region rabies, it was Louis Pasteur who developed the first effective cure, after all.

But if the Gevaudan animals were rabid, wouldn't all those bitten surviviors have died?

 

[QuaziWashboard]

How many survivors were actualy 'bitten'?

 

[OldTimeRadio]

How many survivors were actualy 'bitten'?

I've never compiled the actual statistics, but based on various accounts I've read the percentage would seem to be considerable. One would have been enough.

 

[Xanatico]

And as mentioned in Brotherhood of the Wolf, a rabid animal would die rather quickly. A matter of weeks probably.

 

[Leaferne]

Dunno if this might be of interest to anyone. (OTR, did you get that PM I sent you a few weeks ago re: some other books?)

 

[OldTimeRadio]

And as mentioned in Brotherhood of the Wolf, a rabid animal would die rather quickly. A matter of weeks probably.

And rabies was never mentioned in connection with any of the other French "Beast" cases.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

I'm sorry, but don't mangey mammals go off-feed? By the time they're three-quarters mange-covered they're supposed to be able to consume nothing but water. Or at least that's the way it's been described to me.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

While I admit that rabies may be a bit of a non-starter (it had to be looked at in order to be eliminated) I must mention that I've done quite a bit of work with rescued dogs and seen them in some pretty bad states, malnourished, covered in mange, weakened, but I've never seen one so bad it wouldn't eat, infact, it's often quite hard to remind oneself that when you're feeding up an underweight dog, you have to give them small amounts at first or they'll just throw it back up, because anything you put in front of them is wolfed down in no time.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

It might be worth mentioning here than rabies in humans can have an incubation period of up to two years.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

So it's possible that a person could have been bitten by a rabid bear then developed rabies so much later that the two instances wouldn't appear to be connected?
It'd be interesting to find out if any of the survivors died of rabies or hydrophobia later on in life.

 

[Quake42]

Given that European brown bears are generally very shy, timid animals, and that mange would weaken them greatly, I'm still struggling to see with an ursine idenity for la Bete. It's an interesting theory but we seem to be trying to twist the story to fit the theory rather than the other way round.

For the theory to work it has to be an unusually large bear, with a severe case of mange to make it look like a wolf and perhaps rabies or something similar to explain its aggression. The lack of a tail can only be explained by eye witness error, which is of course well known - nevertheless it seems odd that no single witness identified it as a bear. It just doesn't add up to me at all.

On the facts as presented I still think that we are looking at some sort of non-indigenous creature such as a big cat of some description or, potentially, a genuine unknown predator. Or, possibly, as OTR suggests, some sort of other-worldly creature.

 

[QuaziWashboard]

Given that European brown bears are generally very shy, timid animals, and that mange would weaken them greatly, I'm still struggling to see with an ursine idenity for la Bete. It's an interesting theory but we seem to be trying to twist the story to fit the theory rather than the other way round.

For the theory to work it has to be an unusually large bear, with a severe case of mange to make it look like a wolf and perhaps rabies or something similar to explain its aggression. The lack of a tail can only be explained by eye witness error, which is of course well known - nevertheless it seems odd that no single witness identified it as a bear. It just doesn't add up to me at all.

On the facts as presented I still think that we are looking at some sort of non-indigenous creature such as a big cat of some description or, potentially, a genuine unknown predator. Or, possibly, as OTR suggests, some sort of other-worldly creature.

Something killed those people.
It was described as 'as big as a cow.' Big cats are nowhere near as big as a cow, even the 'smaller than modern day' domesticated breeds that were being farmed at the time. The only living predators known to science that could come close to this description are bears. Unusualy large and/or aggressive bears are also known to science. Unusualy large and/or aggressive wolves are also known to science, but none that can be described as 'as large as a cow.'
Some of the other descriptions suggest bears too, namely, the length of the claws, the 'red' coat and the 'white mark' on it's chest.
If this wasn't in France but in Canada, I'd swear it was a Kodiac bear, but as you mentioned earlier, it's possible that something escaped from a managerie of some kind. If that did happen and that creature was something like a Kodiac bear, it could also explain how the attacks could keep happening for all those years because it would have been able to mate with the local bears (both being 'Brown' or 'Grizzly' bears) and pass on it's 'large size and aggression' genes to other generations.
I'm just simply trying to solve this puzzle with the facts that we know for cirtain are correct or scenarios we know could have happened.