• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

The Beast Of Gévaudan

Re: Hyena Question

OldTimeRadio said:
Over the years I've managed to pick up two entirely different mental images of Hyenas, and both came from professional naturalists who were at least supposed to know what they were talking about.

The first is "dirty, disgusting, cowardly little scavengers who live on the left-overs of the kill that the higher animals won't even touch."

But the second is "ravening, carnivorous predators who will attack and kill anything in their path, including humans. They have been known to wipe out entire hman villages."

Which is correct?
Click to expand...

I suppose it depends on which type of hyena you're talking about, which in itself gives us a bit of a headache. There are four, Spotted, Striped, Brown and Aardwolf. Although it has the right markings, the striped hyena would be far to small to be the Gevaudan Beast but the larger spotted hyena is missing the required markings. Of the two, I would suggest that the spotted is more likely, but even then I still don't think it was one of these. If it was and they've been killing between 1581 and 1951 there would have to be a breeding population, the noise of which, which can carry for miles and miles, would cirtainly not go unnoticed.
Basicaly they always take the path of least resistance. They mainly scavenge for food but when hungry and can't find any available food, they will hunt, especialy when a daytime thunderstorm leaves the ground slippery making antelopes easier to catch. In other words, they are the perfect opportunists.
Are there any reports of strange 'whooping' or 'laughing' noises in any of the Gevaudan Beast reports? Because hyenas are VERY vocal and these noises would almost cirtainly accompany a hyena kill.

Check out http://www.nature-wildlife.com/hyenatxt.htm for more info on behaviour.

NB. There was a Giant Europian Cave Hyena that's supposed to have lived 500,000 - 20,000 years ago.
 
I confess I never realized the thylacines were so small. The film clip and still photos I've seen didn't give much opportunity for accurate size comparison.

Thanks for the information.
 
Hyenas have not been studied much unrtil recently as they are mainly night active

I think they hunt by night and scavenge by day.

They are adaptable animals, who have a varied hunting method, and a complex social life, awful hormones and a perpetual war with the lions.
 
Re: Hyena Question

QuaziWashboard said:
Are there any reports of strange 'whooping' or 'laughing' noises in any of the Gevaudan Beast reports? Because hyenas are VERY vocal and these noises would almost cirtainly accompany a hyena kill.
Click to expand...

Not that I've ever heard.
 
Re: Hyena Question

OldTimeRadio said:
QuaziWashboard said:
Are there any reports of strange 'whooping' or 'laughing' noises in any of the Gevaudan Beast reports? Because hyenas are VERY vocal and these noises would almost cirtainly accompany a hyena kill.
Click to expand...

Not that I've ever heard.
Click to expand...
Well in that case I can't see it being a hyena. If there was one or more in the area, this unusual noise would definately have been noticed by someone and mentioned.
 
Hyenas are rather nasty animals, very agressive. The females apparently have a lot of testosterone in their body, making them quite aggresive but also making their clitoris enlarge into something resembling a penis. Which means even up close it is difficult to tell the genders apart.
 
Xanatico said:
Hyenas are rather nasty animals, very agressive. The females apparently have a lot of testosterone in their body, making them quite aggresive but also making their clitoris enlarge into something resembling a penis. Which means even up close it is difficult to tell the genders apart.
Click to expand...

Fine, but where in the world did all the stories of hyenas as "cowardly scavengers" originate? I've even heard that from professional naturalists and zoologists!
 
Probably because not even hyenas are stupid enough to argue with lions at a kill site (unless they greatly outnumber the lions enough to intimidate them) and have been observed being chased away by lions, who are also known to chase away and even kill other predators in the surrounding area that would be in direct competition with them. As mentioned earlier, most hyenas do their hunting at night so this aspect of them will not have been observed very much until night vision technology was invented.

Disney's 'The Lion King' didn't help either. ;)
 
At a charity bookstore I picked up a copy of 'Casebook of the Unknown' by John Macklin, one of those 'strange-but-true' paperbacks that proliferated in the 60s and 70s.

One chapter, The Hounds of Hell, deals with the village of Saebo, "on the northern shore of Sicily between Palermo and Trapani". For over a year in 1906-7, the village was terrorized by two creatures over four feet tall. They left footprints like dogs, but much larger. Some witnesses said they were not dogs, but dog-headed men.

At first attacking remote farms, they then struck in the village itself, even entering homes to drag people from their beds. In all nine people were killed, and twelve more survived attacks.

Does anyone know more about this case? Google turns up nothing.
 
I'd be really careful before accepting anything from John Macklin.

He is an excellent wordsmith and writes like the wind on fire and is always entertaining to read, but very often his "facts" are another matter entirely.

For just one example, it was Macklin who moved the hoary old legend of the Green Children from 12th Century England to.....1887! He also moved the tale from England to the village of Banjos, Spain. (Banjos doesn't seem to even exist.) Macklin also re-cycled several names from the British story....changing them to their Spanish equivalents!

This phony rehash has plagued serious Paranormal research for 40 years, with a number of first-rank researchers taking it at face value and further perpetuating it. Macklin's recension continues to muddy already murky waters.
 
Google has certainly never heard of any "Saebo, Sicily."

And it's long been my understanding that "Sabo" (the much more common spelling) is a FINNISH name.
 
Just returned from 7 months in Africa and while in Tanzania I read there had been another recent series of killing by a lion in that country. I don't have the exact dates but I want to say it occurred around 2001. The number of dead was in the 30s as well as I can remember. I saw a breakdown of victims and most were alone. A few survived and were clear it was a lion. Most of the killings occurred in one of two ways. The Maasi erect poles with a small platform at the top and someone (usually a boy) stays on the platform at night to watch over their cattle. This lion learned to leap up and pull the victim off the platform. He also learned that if he jumped on the roof of huts, they would collapse and he could kill the inhabitant. Professional hunters were brought in and they killed a number of lions (6 or 8?) and finally got the one they thought was responsible. The killings stopped and this lion became known locally as Saddam. As I recall there was nothing unusual about him except he was fairly large. Can't find anything about it online, I'll have to look through my luggage and see if I saved the article. Not too relevant, but does point out that these killing still occur.

One other point, while hyenas will bite a sleeping person they will normally run the minute the victim wakes up. They are probably biting to see if the person is alive. They were not considered a threat by people I met although they certainly have the potential to kill if they were so inclined.
 
tuckeg said:
One other point, while hyenas will bite a sleeping person they will normally run the minute the victim wakes up. They are probably biting to see if the person is alive. They were not considered a threat by people I met although they certainly have the potential to kill if they were so inclined.
Click to expand...

On the other hand, there were several press reports a year or so back claiming that packs of hyenas had very nearly wiped out two or three African villages.

It's these wildly conflicting reports of hyena behavior - even from professional naturalists and zoologists - that have left me so darned confused!
 
OldTimeRadio said:
tuckeg said:
One other point, while hyenas will bite a sleeping person they will normally run the minute the victim wakes up. They are probably biting to see if the person is alive. They were not considered a threat by people I met although they certainly have the potential to kill if they were so inclined.
Click to expand...

On the other hand, there were several press reports a year or so back claiming that packs of hyenas had very nearly wiped out two or three African villages.

It's these wildly conflicting reports of hyena behavior - even from professional naturalists and zoologists - that have left me so darned confused!
Click to expand...

Just a thought but are all the hyena reports you've heard or read been about the same species of hyena or just hyenas in general? I should imagine behaviour could varey quite a bit from one breed to another.
 
tuckeg said:
I am not saying it can't happen (see links) but it would be very unusual and probably indicated an injured or ill animal.
Click to expand...

But at least a few of the attacks on villages seem to have been by hyena packs.

And of course with rabies all bets are off.

Thanks very much for the links.
 
After re-reading the evidence presented here and checking through my own files I don't believe the twin Gevaudan Beasts can possibly have been hyenas, for two main reasons:

1. There is absolutely no mention of the Gevaudan animals making the standard hyena "laughing whoop" after kills, or at any other time. This alone entirely rules out hyenas.

2. The Gevaudan attacks are merely the best-known and most-publicized of the many Beast attacks which had plagued France from the 15th Century onwards (and in fact continued until at least the early 19th Century). The death toll from the Beast of Besnais in the 1690s was TWICE that of Gauvedan! Nobody suggests hyenas in connection with any of those attacks.
 
It couldn't just be something as simple as bear attacks could it?
There are currently bear populations all over Europe including France itself and Italy, Spain and Austria which all share borders with France.
It general, like most animals, bears tend to avoid humans but a hungry bear will attack almost anything. Also, a hungry bear tends to be a thin, skinny bear which could, if witnessed by someone who's never seen a bear before or seen in the dark, could easily be confused as a large wolf-like creature.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
1. There is absolutely no mention of the Gevaudan animals making the standard hyena "laughing whoop' after kills, or at any other time.

It's one of the things my wife and I miss most about Africa. It's an amazing sound to hear.
Click to expand...
 
Here is a rather long article on man-eating, concentrating on the Tsavo. Unfortunately it doesn't include the Tanzania attacks after 2000.

I loved the quote by Lugard (1893), ‘I have never seen anything approaching the carelessness of human life and the callousness to human suffering which seem to characterise some methods of African travel’ . Today he could find it if he climbed on Everest.
 
QuaziWashboard said:
It couldn't just be something as simple as bear attacks could it?
Click to expand...

But even if the Gevaudan locals had never seen a bear before (and I personally doubt that), wouldn't the King's official hunters have recognized them?
 
Tuckeg, this is not intended even slightly as criticism, since it took me several months on this list and a couple of nudges from the Mods (bless 'em) to set me straight, but if you add [/quote] after quoted material and DON'T check the "Disable BBCode" function, the material will be set off in its own box and be less confusing.

Like this:

OldTimeRadio said:
1. There is absolutely no mention of the Gevaudan animals making the standard hyena "laughing whoop' after kills, or at any other time.
Click to expand...

It's one of the things my wife and I miss most about Africa. It's an amazing sound to hear.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
QuaziWashboard said:
It couldn't just be something as simple as bear attacks could it?
Click to expand...

But even if the Gevaudan locals had never seen a bear before (and I personally doubt that), wouldn't the King's official hunters have recognized them?
Click to expand...

Oh I dunno, people can live in the same area as bears all their lives without actualy seeing one.
The King's hunters would have been sent out to hunt for a large dog-like creature, as reported by the locals. Even if they saw a bear, they may not have recognised it for the creature that had been killing people.
 
One of the two Gevaudan Beasts (I forget which) was sent to Paris after it was killed, stuffed and then displayed in the Paris Museum for the next 20-25 years.

The surviving woodcut, which shows tourists standing around the Beast, seems a fairly accurate representation.

What it portrays seems to be a very large wolf-like creature of unknown type. It is NOT in the least bear-like.
 
OldTimeRadio,

Thanks, I'll try it next time.

tuckeg
 
OldTimeRadio said:
One of the two Gevaudan Beasts (I forget which) was sent to Paris after it was killed, stuffed and then displayed in the Paris Museum for the next 20-25 years.

The surviving woodcut, which shows tourists standing around the Beast, seems a fairly accurate representation.

What it portrays seems to be a very large wolf-like creature of unknown type. It is NOT in the least bear-like.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's kinda what I'm getting at, they killed a couple of wolflike creatures. Although it's hard to tell exactly what it was as woodcuts are not the most accurate way of recording forensics, but I'd hazard a guess at them just being wolfs, seeing as how there were lots of them around then. But that doesn't nessesarily mean that the beast responsible for the killings was a wolf. Just that that's what they were sent out to kill because the locals, who may or may not have been accurate in what they saw, described a wolf-like creature. But remember, some of the victims had their skulls crushed. Which do you think would be a more likely culprit to do something like this, a wolf or a bear?
 
QuaziWashboard said:
But remember, some of the victims had their skulls crushed. Which do you think would be a more likely culprit to do something like this, a wolf or a bear?
Click to expand...

Or something else entirely we havent thought if yet...
 
Semyaz said:
QuaziWashboard said:
But remember, some of the victims had their skulls crushed. Which do you think would be a more likely culprit to do something like this, a wolf or a bear?
Click to expand...

Or something else entirely we havent thought if yet...
Click to expand...

True, but the evidence so far suggests that it was a large carnivorous animal of some kind, big enough to crush a person's skull. If it was a known, naturaly occuring wild animal to the area, it must have been a bear because wolves just can't open their mouths wide enough to fit enough of a human head in it to crush it. I know this because I have a BIG dog, bigger than a wolf anyway, and I've just tried to fit my head in it's mouth, the dog didn't seem to mind and is generaly very placid, :roll: but I just couldn't get enough of my head in for the dog to be able to crush it. If it had bitten me, I'd have been a bit of a mess and maybe lost an ear, but my skull wouldn't be crushed. (*sigh*...the things I do for science) It'd be like trying to crush a cricket ball with a pair of pliers. The strength may be there but in order to crush it, the mouth needs to be big enough to place a jaw on either side of the head. But bears, who CAN fit a human head in their mouths, have been known to kill their prey by knocking it over then swiping downwards with their paws and putting all their weight behind the blow, effectively crushing it's victim. A human skull would shatter like glass under such a force.
 
QuaziWashboard said:
I know this because I have a BIG dog, bigger than a wolf anyway, and I've just tried to fit my head in it's mouth
Click to expand...

Why?? That must have been some attack of curiosity... :shock:

QuaziWashboard said:
But bears, who CAN fit a human head in their mouths, have been known to kill their prey by knocking it over then swiping downwards with their paws and putting all their weight behind the blow, effectively crushing it's victim. A human skull would shatter like glass under such a force.
Click to expand...

That's a lovely image...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top