Brotherhood Of The Wolf

[customizerwannabe]

This is one of my alltime favorite flicks. I'd buy anything SS made from it. Well...except any fking bobbleheads.

 

[Malice]

shameless necroposter bump

 

[Malice]

shameless necroposter bump

what he said! sideshow lets do the damn thing!

 

[Kratos]

I love this film and it'd be cool too see collectibles from the film not collectibles I'd buy but would still be great too see them

 

[Asta]

I watched this again the other day, after becoming obsessed with "The Beast of Gevaudan".

The attacks between 1764-1767 are a fascinating and mysterious chapter of history, fuelled by politics, folklore and mass hysteria.

I doubt the identity of the Beast (or Beasts) will ever be conclusively proved.

There are three main candidates:

Hyena

The 1819 guidebook from the National Natural History Museum, Paris, described hyenas as looking just like "the Beast of Gevaudan". The book also describes the hyena's nature as being very aggressive and attacking vulnerable victims such as small children. Descriptions of injuries of the victims also similar to those a Hyena would inflict.

The drawing Jean Chastel made of the striped beast he killed on 19th June 1767 was also defined as a hyena.

Wolf-Dog Hybrid

Another option is a wolf-dog hybrid, and entails the conspiracy of an animal trained to kill people.

The first Beast, which was killed in 1765, was stuffed and displayed at Versailles:

The King was content to accept that this was the Beast, and the problem was solved. This is where politics comes into play.

Descriptions of the animal, with it's white front and underside, discount wolf and point towards a wolf-dog hybrid. The dog aspect would make it more aggressive than a pure wolf, unafraid of humans and also trainable, while retaining the cunning of a wolf.

The person suspected of being its master was Count Jean-Francois-Charles de Morangies, a rich, depraved sadist who was also against the king. He may have used the farmer and wolfhound breeder, Jean Chastel and his son, Antoine, to train the Beast. The proposed motivation was to foster revolution against the king, since the peasants were afraid to work in the fields.

Chastel allegedly owned a huge red mastiff which might have been bred with a female wolf to create the Beast.

About twenty years ago a French detective mapped the killings, revealing six different killing zones. The zone where it was most active was where the Chastels lived, in the parish of La Besseyre Saint Mary, where the second animal was killed in 1767.

The conspiracy theory is bolstered by another factor:

https://johnknifton.com/tag/antoine-chastel/
Jean Chastel was known to be loud, belligerent and generally anti-social, and was at one time imprisoned. His demeanor changed profoundly from May 16th 1767 onwards. On this date, in the village of Septols, Marie Denty was attacked in a little lane near her house, right under the eyes of her parents, and killed, just before her twelfth birthday. Supposedly, she and Jean Chastel were very close friends and he doted on her like the grand-daughter he never had. Now he was “fou de douleur”, “mad with grief”, and seemed about to lose his sanity. Perhaps, les Chastel and their appalling pet had killed by mistake. Certainly, his ne’er-do-well son, Antoine, seemed suddenly to be released from an evil spell, and he turned straightway to God. Jean spent his time in pure pursuits such as prayer, confession and penitence. For his redemption to be complete, he and he alone had to be the man who finally killed la Bèstia. According to which sources you believe, in best werewolf killer tradition, he made some silver bullets. Or perhaps, he made them from molten lead which had had a statue of the Virgin Mary dipped into it. Or perhaps he made them from the medals of the Virgin Mary which he wore on his hat. Whatever the case, he certainly had them blessed at a religious ceremony.

The manner in which he killed the creature is extremely suspicious, and could very easily be interpreted as a tale told merely to satisfy contemporary religious feelings, and to exonerate a man who is not bravely hunting down a ferocious killer beast, but who is, instead, shooting it through the head in its kennel before the locals find out it is actually his beloved pet, and then string him up from the nearest tree. The following account I have translated from the French Wikipédia

“On June 19th, the Marquis d’Apcher decides to organise a beat around Mont Mouchet in the wood of la Ténazeire. He is accompanied by a few neighbours as volunteers including Jean Chastel reputed to be an excellent hunter. The latter finds himself at a place called la Sogne d’Auvers, a crossroads where he sees the animal go past. Chastel fires at it, and manages to wound on the shoulder. Quickly the marquis’ dogs arrive to finish off the beast.”

“As regards this rifle shot, Legend has preserved the romanticised words of the priest Pierre Pourcher which he used to say came from tale told by his family, “When the beast came along, Chastel was saying prayers to the Holy Virgin. He recognised it straightaway, but through a feeling of piety and confidence in the Mother of God, he wanted to finish his prayers. Afterwards, he closes his prayerbook, folds his glasses up, puts them in his pocket and takes his rifle. In an instant he kills the beast which had been waiting for him.”

“A week after the destruction of the beast by Jean Chastel,on June 25th, a female wolf which according to several witness accounts used to accompany the beast itself was killed by Sir Jean Terrisse, one of the hunters His Grace de la Tour d’Auvergne. He received £78 as a reward.”

Perhaps they were acting on behalf of somebody else. The usual favourite is Jean-François-Charles de La Molette, the Count of Morangiès. He may have wanted to destabilise the area, so that he could take over when the revolution inevitably came. There were others. The Church wanted to teach the King and the members of the intelligentsia of the time that free thinking is frowned upon by God….

“Return to the Ways of the Lord or face the Hound of Hell”

Myth

Descriptions of the Beast are compounded by the folklore of the time. This is a depiction of the Beast from 1765:

The ridge of spines recalls many reports that the Beast had bristled hair down its back, but the engraving exaggerates them in the manner of the mythical creature known as the Tarasque:


https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/re...n-depictions-of-the-beast-of-gevaudan-1764-5/
The spines mimic depictions of the Tarasque - Every year in towns and villages throughout the former Languedoc region and in neighbouring Provence, locals hold an annual procession to commemorate Sainte Marthe: the early medieval saint who delivered the town of Tarascon from a terrible monster known as the Tarasque.

While the overall appearance of the creature is perhaps a synthesis of multiple reports published in the Courier d’Avignon which claimed the animal to be a panther, a lynx, or a lion, ultimately the monstrousness of the Tarasque, expressed in the row of spines along the creature’s back, still finds a place within this synthesis and as part of a visual form which the print itself claims to be beyond doubt. Comparing the Beast’s depictions to those of the Tarasque, it is possible to see how the two are often extremely similar, couched as they are within a regionally-specific visual discourse of monstrousness.

One final consideration of the role played by the regional iconography of monstrousness, itself derived from the popular culture of Southern French processions and carnivals, comes from the reporter Tardieu de LaBarthe. A native of the Languedoc town of Marjevols, LaBarthe discussed the story of a group of children who had chased the Beast into a bog after it attempted to eat one of their group. At the behest of their leader Jacques Portefaix, the children had beaten the monster with sticks until it released the boy and fled.34 This anecdote of Portefaix and his gang of brave warrior children, while both strange and almost comical in equal measure, is a useful point of entry into the story of the Beast as it was expressed in relation to Languedoc’s popular and localised forms of ceremony. Just as the mystery creature may have borrowed some or all of its monstrousness from the iconography of the Tarasque, the armed gang of children also has its roots in the ritual calendar of the Languedoc region (this time distinct from the wider sphere of the Rhȏne). In the city of Toulouse, the capital of Languedoc, every year on rogations day a traditional event called the Acampa would take place, where groups of children would be armed and made to fight one another in the form of mock rival militias, taking place throughout the town and its immediate surrounding countryside.35 The tradition emerged as a humorous re-enactment of the Medieval warring over internal boundaries within the city during the Albigensian Crusade in the thirteenth century,36 and the arming of children for a day was a kind of symbolic subversion where the social order was briefly overturned in favour of an unusual and amusing spectacle.37 The Acampa is a singular form of popular spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern France, and was particular to the city of Toulouse: a city which we might consider to be another localised pole of cultural influence from the towns of the Rhȏne.

The popular story of Portefaix and his band of fellow children fighting off the creature with sticks appears to represent a symbolic merging of various folkloric and regionally specific tropes that the people of Languedoc would have experienced at the high point of the ceremonial calendar in the Summer. The band of armed children, in the manner of the Acampa, clashed with the Beast, whose depictions familiarised and expressed its monstrousness in relation to the Tarasque: wooden representations of which would have bobbed and hissed their way through the crowds at Sainte Marthe’s Day parades across the langue d’oc-speaking region. In this way, we can understand how the visual conception of the Beast of Gévaudan had its roots in the localised popular culture which ranged from Toulouse and Montpellier to the Provencal towns that lined the banks of the Rhône. Both in depictions, as well as the articulation of certain events in the Beast’s narrative, the iconography of the Tarasque appears to have played a large part in this regionally specific conception of the monster in the area of its first appearance. The creature can be said to have originated in the cyclical events of Languedoc’s annual calendar, coming from an unbroken Medieval tradition. In the French capital, however, the Beast would find a new context, as shifting social factors created a febrile and symbolically charged popular discourse concerning the authority of the Bourbons and the imbalance of both the social and ecological orders.

 

[Asta]

Subadult Lion

But does that lionesque depiction above actually have more in common with the Beast of Gevaudan than all the images of it showing it as an exceptionally large wolf or wolf-dog?

Karl-Hans Taake made a compelling argument that it was a lion, which supports the creature in Brotherhood of the Wolf.


Biology of the “Beast of Gévaudan”: Morphology, Habitat Use, and Hunting Behaviour of an 18th Century Man-Eating Carnivore by Karl-Hans Taake

Morphology

The described body size, the length of a paw imprint, and the reported strength (Table 1) prove in combination that the animal belonged to one of the few species of very large terrestrial carnivores. Morphological details, such as the long tail with its tassel, the flat upper side of the head, the stronger front of the body as compared to the rear, as well as characteristics of the fur and behavioural traits allow us to narrow down the number of species that come into question to only one, namely Panthera leo.

Surviving victims, other eyewitnesses, and hunters reported having seen a large carnivore that had upright hair on the back of its head and neck and a dark line along its spine. Both features are among the best-documented traits of the Beast: witnesses described these and other revealing features on different occasions, usually in their own words. A dark line and upright hair at the neck, a so-called Mohawk mane, are characteristics which occur in lions.

Table 1 summarizes characteristics of the Beast. Conclusions that are definitely wrong have been excluded from the table, for example, the assumption that the Beast had claws only on its front paws. Also, the descriptions of those killed wolves which were arbitrarily selected by hunters or peasants and presented as “the Beast” remain unconsidered in this article. This includes the description of a male wolf that was shot on 19 June 1767 and is regarded until this day as the attacker, although the inherently contradictory autopsy report on this animal reflects the obvious effort to attribute catlike features of the Beast to a normal wolf.


Table 1: Characteristics of the Beast of Gévaudan

Body body size compared to that of a one-year-old bovine and a donkey;1,2,3 “twice as long as an ordinary wolf and much higher”;4 “body ‘much broader in front than in the rear’”;5 great “‘agility and flexibility’”;6 “catlike features”7

Fur described as reddish,8 reddish brown,9 rusty, or tawny;10,11 stripe along the spine, described as black, brown or dark;12 “a black stripe with the width of four fingers from the neck to the tail”;13 chest hair grey-white;14 belly hair whitish;15 “the neck covered with long and black hair”;16 “bristly patch of fur between its ears”;17 “tuft of fur above its eyes which it bristles up”;18 “‘raised tuft of hair on top of the head and between the ears’”;19 “hair is very long”20

Head “‘very large and flat head’”;21 “wide forehead ‘a foot across’”;22 “eyes … sparkle”;23 “short ears”;24 “the muzzle almost comparable with that of a lion”25

Paw paw imprint about 16 cm in length;26 claws “as long as a finger”, used in attacks and for defence;27,28 Beast held human victims down with its paws29

Tail “extremely long and tufted”;30 “so long that it reaches the ground”;31 “similar to the tail of a leopard”;32 of a “terrible strength”;33 “as thick as an arm”;34 tip of the tail “extraordinarily thick”; tail “‘sticking up at the end’”; “swings it like a cat before pouncing on its prey”35

Strength leaped “28 feet in one bound in flat country”;36 dragged a killed woman “a long way through the bushes, which were very dense”;37 dragged the body of a 12-year-old girl “to the top of a high mountain”38

Robustness hunters failed to kill the Beast with lead bullets and only injured it39

Vocalization “‘its cry is precisely that of a braying ass’”;40 “a dull sound like that of a dog wishing to bark”41

Odour “‘a tuft of fur … was striking for its great stench’”;42 “unusual stench”;43 hounds, trained to follow wolf tracks, refused to follow the Beast’s track;44,45 dogs which saw or smelled the Beast took flight46



Habitat use

The total home range of the Beast over the years 1764-67 covered an area of about two and a half thousand square kilometres in Gévaudan and adjoining parts of Vivarais and Auvergne. This landscape was a highly diverse highland region, sparsely populated, with woods, shrubland, heathland, open grassland, marshland, bogs, gorges, caves, streams, and rocky outcrops. The Beast’s preferred abode was the open country, where it hid in 4 wheat fields (its “favourite hiding places”)47 or sat on a rock, for instance, and watched what was going on in a valley, or lurked on pastures among broom and juniper or behind dry walls. It usually only retreated into the wood when it was being hunted or wanted to carry its prey to a place where this could be devoured in safety.48,49 The Beast also entered villages and gardens of houses, even in full daylight, to attack humans there.50

In spring and summer 1764, the Beast concentrated its attacks on an area of 350 to 400 square kilometres at an altitude of 1000 to 1200 metres to the south and southwest of the commune Langogne. In October 1764, it moved, obviously in reaction to the hunts in this area, about two dozen kilometres to the west and attacked humans in an area of roughly equal size in the region around the communes Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, Aumont-Aubrac, and Saint-Chély-d’Apcher. In November and December 1764, it extended the latter area to a (rough) triangle that reached to the southwest, north, and southeast for about two to three dozen kilometres in each of these directions beyond the area that was previously haunted. The next change followed in January 1765 and so on.51 Although these changes of location were very probably a consequence of hunts on the Beast, they were not always a direct response to the hunts in its home range – instead the Beast seems to have learned that frequent changes of its abode diminished the risk of confrontations with hunters. After the large-scale battues had been given up, the Beast stopped its migrations.

The last area haunted by the Beast, where it remained for, by far, the longest time, namely from September 1765 to summer 1767, was again an area of about 400 square kilometres in the Margeride around the commune Paulhac-en-Margeride – exactly that area where the king’s gun-bearer François Antoine had shot wolves before,52 including a big wolf in September 1765, which he presented at the court in Versailles as the “Beast of Gévaudan”. After Antoine’s wolf hunts in this area, the case was closed for the court: 53 no more extensive hunts were organized. The Beast stayed in an area that obviously 5 provided, with its rocky grass and heathlands, a particularly suitable habitat. Furthermore, the Beast benefited from the fact that Antoine had “cleared” the area of wolves, which were competitors for the Beast: just like wolves, the Beast must have relied, to a great extent, on ungulates as prey.


Wolf territories

Gévaudan was undoubtedly populated by more than one pack of wolves. This is obvious when one considers, among other things, the high numbers of shot and poisoned wolves: for example, 99 wolves were killed in Gévaudan from 12 April 1766 to 19 March 1767.54 The land was an optimal wolf habitat: rich in hiding places, often inaccessible for man, and rich in wild and domesticated ungulates; wild ungulates were abundant, because they were protected (until the revolutionary year of 1789) by the gamekeepers of the aristocratic landowners. This extended wolf habitat must have been divided into wolf territories. Man-eating wolves would not have the freedom to prey on humans (as the Beast did) for some months in the east of an area with the size of thousands of square kilometres, then to migrate to the west, attack humans there (now leaving the previously haunted area in peace), later to move to the north and so on: such migrations would have necessitated crossing the territories of other wolves, and the consequences of this would have been deadly attacks by conspecifics. The only theoretically possible alternative to support the assumption that the Beast was a wolf (or wolves) would be that man-eating wolves of one pack stopped attacking humans at the very time when wolves of another pack started attacking humans in their own territory, a process that would require multiple repetitions with the participation of several wolf packs – this does not need any discussion.


Attacking and handling victims

The Beast “attacks … by surprise”;55 it was observed “laying in ambush”,56 stalking its prey by “creeping on its belly like a snake”, and rearing “up on its hind legs”57 during the attack (Figure 1). It attacked humans in the region of the head and neck58 and obviously suffocated victims in some cases – a killing technique used by pantherine cats to kill ungulates. On 8 October 1764, the Beast seized a 15-year-old youth near Le Pouget (parish of La Fage-Montivernoux) by his neck and tried, without piercing his neck with its teeth, to throttle him between its jaws. Because of his fierce resistance, the boy survived with serious injuries and was temporarily mentally handicapped; claw marks were visible on his chest. 59

The books of the abbés Pierre Pourcher and François Fabre (first editions published in 1889, respectively in 1901) contain a large number of 18th century testimonies about those attacks of the Beast where it was reported having used its paws and/or claws in attacks or in defence against a stabbing weapon or where injuries on humans caused by the Beast’s claws are described. It is beyond any doubt that this behaviour is inconsistent with the behaviour of any species of the family Canidae, but thoroughly consistent with the behaviour of a pantherine cat.

A strange aspect regarding the Beast’s treatment of human victims is that it decapitated 15 victims: children, youths, and women. Historians believe that the heads were accidentally separated from the bodies as a consequence of attacks at the throat and of dragging victims through vegetation. However, it is improbable that the head of a youth or adult victim was accidentally separated from the body during an attack or while carrying off the body, all the more as the total number of decapitated victims was remarkably high. On 6 January 1765, the Beast tore out pieces of tissue from the throat of a 25-year-old woman, killed between the villages of Montclergues and Montfol (parish of Fournels), but did not eat these pieces;61 this seems to have been an incomplete decapitation. An explanation for this behaviour and for the decapitations is that the 7 Beast, which was reported as drinking, licking up, or “sucking” blood, 62,63 wanted to gain unhindered access to the blood flow from ruptured carotid arteries and jugular veins.

Seven heads were carried off by the Beast.64 As eight separated heads were not carried off, carrying off heads was a consequence of the beheadings and not the aim. On 25 November 1764, the Beast killed and beheaded the approximately 60-year-old Catherine Vally from the village of Buffeyrettes (parish of Aumont) and carried off her head; when the head was found, it had been split in two, judging from the enormous teeth marks “in the way a man’s mouth might crack a nut”. And the skull had been cleaned inside and outside so thoroughly, “as if polished with a tool”.65 It is hard to imagine in this case any other “tool” than a specially adapted cat tongue. This thorough removal of the soft body tissues certainly did not result, as proposed by François de Beaufort (cited by Moriceau)66, from the activity of wolf cubs playing with the head; the more so as in November there were no cubs that could have romped around with remains of prey.

On 2 July 1765, in the region of Aubrac, the Beast attacked a horse that was followed by two men. The Beast jumped on the horse and inflicted two serious wounds to it, ten centimetres apart. The wound that was higher up on the back of the horse was about 17 centimetres long and ran from the croup to the rear end. The lower wound was four centimetres wide and just as deep.67 The long wound was very probably a claw injury. It is not conceivable why a wolf should jump on the back of a horse and how a wolf could have inflicted such a wound; but it is a well-known attack strategy of big cats to jump at large ungulates from behind and to hold onto the back or rear end with their claws and teeth to bring down the victim. In two other cases the Beast attacked horses with riders; as explained earlier, also in these cases very probably the horses and not the riders were the aim of the attacks.68


Selection of human prey

As shown earlier, the proportion of adult Beast victims over 18 years is more than six times higher than the comparable percentage published by Linnell et al. for wolves: when the data related to the Beast are presented separately from the wolf data, these percentages are 26 (Beast victims) versus 4 (wolf victims). On the other hand, the proportion of children under the age of ten is, in the Gévaudan data, only one third as compared to the wolf data: 20 versus 60 percent.69 Older victims are, in general, bigger and stronger; therefore, these percentages reflect the larger body size of the Beast as a predator.

What is particularly remarkable is that attacks on children under the age of ten obviously resulted from the hunting pressure on the Beast: among the first 15 victims of known age, killed in the year 1764, there was no child under the age of ten; the same is true for seven more victims who were hurt or attacked without being hurt in 1764. On the other hand, the proportion of killed victims over the age of 18 was, with 40 percent, strikingly high (Figure 3). So this man-eating carnivore, appearing in 1764 in Gévaudan and generally classified as a wolf (or as wolves), did, in this year, as far as we know, not even attempt to attack a child under the age of ten – although young children were sent out to the pastures every day and although the carnivore did not shrink back from preying on humans in their gardens. Regarding historical wolf attacks, children under 8 the age of ten were the most affected group. Furthermore, adult human victims over the age of 18, accounting for only four percent in the wolf data published by Linnell et al. if the Gévaudan data are excluded, 70,71 were affected in Gévaudan in the year 1764, the tenfold of that percentage.

With increasing hunting pressure that also resulted in injuries for the Beast, the percentage of the older victims decreased, while the proportion of the youngest age group, those victims who were the easiest to overwhelm and the quickest to be carried off, went up. The Beast, an “agile leaper of uncommon strength”, 73 managed to carry off a child quickly, as an attack on 27 July 1765 showed; the victim was Pierre Roussel, a boy of about eleven years of age, who was attacked near Servières (parish of Saugues). 74 The Beast attacked the boy before the eyes of his family, ran off with its victim, and jumped, chased by its persecutors, with him over three field walls, each three feet high.

The hunting pressure on the animal, starting in September 1764, was especially high in the first half of February 1765 with the deployment of tens of thousands of beaters and hunters. In the weeks after these so called “general hunts”, the number of killed children under the age of ten went up: of the ten children who were killed in 1765 and who are known to have been under the age of ten, seven were killed in the period from the second half of February until the end of March. After September 1765, the hunting pressure decreased (because the court in Versailles believed that the Beast was dead), but the Beast showed, probably as the aftermath of the battues, a substantial decline of its attacks. This decline became evident in the last quarter of 1765 and it continued 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 1764 (N=15) 1765 (N=39) 1766 (N=7) 1767 (N=12) Percent up to 9 years 10 to 18 y. over 18 y. 9 throughout 1766: in the latter year there were only seven death victims. However, in 1767, the numbers of human victims and the proportion of adult victims went up again (Figure 3).


Conclusion

The assessment that the attacks of the Beast of Gévaudan are a prime example of historic wolf attacks on humans is based upon a misinterpretation of historical sources. The alleged identity of the Beast as Canis lupus, considered even by scientific authors more as a fact than as a hypothesis, contradicts, in a striking manner, handed-down observations and fails to explain significant aspects of the events. The changes in the age groups of those attacked and the shifts of the affected areas show the response of an individual animal to hunting pressure and cannot be explained by a “dangerously dense wolf infestation” 75 . Furthermore, hunters and other witnesses described an extraordinary, highly recognisable animal that was, with regard to its size (proven, inter alia, by a paw imprint measure), its physique, its strength, and its fur, very different from a wolf. The frequent use of claws in attacks and the way in which the carnivore attacked a horse are further observations that allow us to exclude a canid species. However, as already noted earlier, there were, independently of the attacks of the Beast, indeed a few wolf attacks on humans in Gévaudan, including a fatal attack on two boys on 9 April 1767 near Fraissinet (parish of Saint-Privat-du-Fau).76

The lion-hypothesis, indirectly proposed already in 1765 by the dragoon officer Jean Baptiste Duhamel, who supposed that the Beast could be a lion hybrid,77 is consistent with the established knowledge about Panthera leo and with the historic environment: big cats were exhibited in royal and private menageries and at fairs; they were forced to fight against each other and against animals of other species in exhibition fights and were transported with travelling menageries throughout France.78 The lion-hypothesis explains the key observations handed down with the written evidence of the 18th century. Furthermore, this hypothesis fulfils the criterion of parsimony as it explains very different aspects of the incidents by a single factor. And the hypothesis is potentially falsifiable: for example, Beast victims could, at least theoretically, be exhumed and skeletal injuries inflicted by the Beast could be evaluated. Moreover, the attacks on humans in the French region Limousin (1698-1700), which were not so well documented and which are likewise regarded as wolf attacks,79 can be explained as the attacks of a lion.80






Of note, these are the words of Captain Jean Baptiste Duhamel, one of those who hunted the Beast:

“You will undoubtedly think, like I do, that this is a monster, the father of which is a lion. What its mother was remains to be seen.”

 

[Asta]

I've been listening to this 2021 podcast:



Around the one hour fifty mark they tell an account of the aftermath of the killing of the second Beast in 1767, and rather than paraphrase it I looked for a printed source, and found the identical account in the transcript of a 2020 podcast made by someone else:

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4732

The first Beast:

Ultimately, two animals were killed that finally brought an end to the attacks. King Louis XV had sent a good-sized military contingent to the Gévaudan plus organized hunting parties, but when they failed to produce results he sent his personal Lieutenant of the Hunt to replace all of them. François Antoine arrived June 1765, and in late September he finally got his quarry. Using a monopod-mounted matchlock musket, he shot a wolf so big that he wrote:

We never saw a big wolf that could be compared to this one. Hence, we believe this could be the fearsome beast that caused so much damage

Sources report that villagers recognized certain scars on the carcass from times it had been wounded by hunters, but no details survive. Antoine sent the carcass back to Versailles as proof, where it was stuffed and displayed. Antoine also shot a female he believed to be its mate, and also a young male pup which he reported was larger than the mother. Antoine did note that the pup had the congenital defect of double dewclaws — the vestigial digits on a canine's forepaws that correspond to a human's thumbs. He was handsomely rewarded and the attacks stopped — for two months.

The second Beast:

Some dozen or so people were killed by the beast over a six month period, until a local nobleman organized a mass hunt in June 1767 consisting of virtually every able-bodied person who could be armed. Jean Chastel was a hunter who believed the beast to be a loup-garou, and accordingly loaded his double-barreled flintlock rifle with buckshot in one barrel and a large-caliber ball in the other (Chastel's rifle became famous and still exists today in the private collection of a descendant of François Antoine). With Chastel's kill, the attacks stopped for good. The Beast of Gévaudan was no more.

Chastel's kill led to the closest thing we have to empirical evidence of the creature's identity, and that's a written report of the necropsy done on this animal at the nobleman's castle, and known as the Marin Report. It is a detailed objective description of the creature, plus a long list of precise measurements — and it even includes a list of the stomach contents. The animal was no longer complete, as when the surgeon arrived he found a "great crowd of people" already having examined it "with knives which served them as scalpels", and he "saw with the greatest regret that their zeal was superior to their knowledge, and that the most curious parts of the animal no longer existed." Regardless, the notarized necropsy report records all that we know today.

There's a point we've mentioned many times on Skeptoid, and it's a hint that helps you determine which sources are valid and which are not. Lazy authors often copy and paste from each other without going back to the original sources to actually check anything. Virtually any book or article you'll find on the Beast of Gévaudan written by a cryptozoologist says that inside the stomach of the animal, the collarbone of a young girl was found. Dismiss anything that says this, because it's wrong, and it shows that the author did not check their source (and you also can't determine gender from a collarbone). The two existing documents that discuss the necropsy on the animal — the Marin Report and another document known as the Letter from Auvergne — both clearly state that the stomach contained the head of a femur from a child. There is no mention of a collarbone. The French word for femur is fémur — kind of hard to get wrong. Any author who says the animal described in the necropsy report was not a wolf, and also mentions a collarbone, should be dismissed. (Wolves do not typically eat bones, however they'll often crush them for the marrow and ingest fragments.)

As with Antoine's wolf, scars said to be consistent with two injuries inflicted upon the beast by locals during attacks were found on the animal. These were a bayonet injury above its left eye and a bullet wound on its left thigh. Besides this, all the measurements and descriptions of the animal are consistent with a large gray wolf — and not even an especially large one. No irreconcilable traits were noted, with the exception of its teeth. The report lists 22 teeth, and a wolf has 42; those that were specified match what a wolf has, but no mention is made of whether other teeth were missing. The notary who prepared the report, Etienne Marin, wrote:

This animal appears to be a wolf, but an extraordinary one. By its figure and its proportions, it is very different from the wolves that one sees in this country. This is what more than three hundred people from all around have certified.

But this hyperbole contradicts the actual measurements, which were right in line with those of gray wolves there at the time. We might conclude that the excitement of the moment led Marin and the 300 lookyloos to come away with an exaggerated idea of what they saw. In fact this remains the prevailing scientific view on what the Beast of Gévaudan was: one or more large wolves, compounded with a hysterical widely-held belief that it was much larger and fiercer than any ordinary wolf.



But this is not the final word. Chastel's wolf is not recorded to have had the same double dewclaws that Antoine's had, but the fact that double dewclaws were in the local population is noteworthy. One popular sheep herding breed of dog used in the Gévaudan was the Beauceron, a breed in which in the double dewclaws are endemic. The local gray wolves (Canis lupus) and the local Beaucerons (Canis lupus familiaris) are perfectly able to interbreed, and such hybrids are notoriously unpredictable in their behavior. According to the International Wolf Center, wolves and various dog breeds mature at different rates. This leads to unpredictable hormonal changes in a hybrid, which can produce behavioral changes that may include overt aggression. A wolf-Beauceron hybrid could well go through a uniquely aggressive phase as it matures; and once it learns humans are a viable food source, the hunting of humans can become part of their learned behavior. There is no evidence this is what happened, but hormonally induced aggression among hybrids is well known and the hybridization of wolves and Beaucerons does appear likely to have taken place.

This appears more probable than one competing explanation for the beast's aggression, which is rabies. Rabid wolves are absolutely more aggressive and are more likely to attack humans. However, rabies is almost always fatal in humans and is easily transmitted by a bite. There were many survivors of the Gévaudan attacks; but all such survivors would have died of rabies if the attacking animal had been infected, and none did. So the rabies explanation is a poor fit.

There is one more popular explanation that ought to be put to rest. Many modern sources report that in 1997, a taxidermist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris found a record indicating that the museum had had a stuffed hyena in its collection from 1766 to 1819. It has also been reported that the son of Jean Chastel had such a hyena in his private menagerie. We might speculate that perhaps young Chastel's hyena escaped, was responsible for some or all of the beast's attacks, then was shot by Antoine, sent to Versailles, and ended up stuffed in the Paris museum. There are two serious problems with this hypothesis. According to the museum, the stuffed hyena was positively identified as a striped hyena, and the largest of these are smaller than an adult wolf. Their features — especially the stripes — are quite distinctive, and would not have escaped mention in the written reports that described Antoine's kill as a large wolf, and would not have escaped depiction in a famous illustration of Antoine's stuffed kill in the court of Louis XV where it appears as a very conventional large black wolf. It seems improbable that the King's Lieutenant of the Hunt shot a hyena then a wolf believing them to be mates, and yet was unable to distinguish between the two species. The second reason to doubt it is that the beast's attacks continued well into 1767, the year after the museum taxidermist said it entered the collection. There is no reason at all to connect the two taxidermy pieces, especially given that all indications are that they were two very different species of animal.

So there was nothing exceptional with the size of the wolf killed in 1767. It was large, but in line with grey wolves in that area at that time. It was identified by its scars, and convicted by its stomach contents: the head of a femur from a child.

However, a pure wolf (or wolves) being the culprit is dismissed by most of the investigators I've read, because it doesn't fit the description or the behaviour pattern.


Karl-Hans Taake, the biologist who wrote Biology of the "Beast of Gévaudan", and concluded it was a juvenile lion, dismissed the involvement of the wolves who were killed:

...the descriptions of those killed wolves which were arbitrarily selected by hunters or peasants and presented as “the Beast” remain unconsidered in this article.

He also wrote the book, The Gévaudan Tragedy: The Disastrous Campaign of a Deported 'Beast'. In there he proposed that the real Beast, the subadult lion, eventually died after eating poisoned bait which had been placed throughout the Gévaudan region.


Whichever path you follow there are inconsistencies with eye witness reports and claims. There are allegedly also accounts of locals killing other wolves, and adding wounds post mortem to match known descriptions, in order to collect a reward. The second Beast was also in such poor condition by the time it was autopsied. The twenty missing teeth may even have actually been taken as souvenirs.

The taxidermied first Beast has disappeared, which is strange since it was in the property of the king and displayed at Versailles. The second one was too rotten and destroyed to preserve.

It all adds to the mystery.

There's also the possibility of a cover up, of human involvement in the killings. Not only the chance the Beast was owned and trained to kill, but since some of the victims had their clothes removed rather than torn off, it suggests the combined activity of a human predator.

 

[Asta]

Here's another article by Karl-Hans Taake from 2020:

Carnivore Attacks on Humans in Historic France and Germany: To Which Species Did the Attackers Belong?

It includes different details than those found in his Biology of the 'Beast of Gevaudan', which I pasted earlier.

There are several reasons why the species identity of the Beast remained mysterious for centuries. The first reason is that from 1764 to 1767 not only Beast attacks occurred in Gévaudan, but also a few wolf attacks: investigators of the Beast attacks did not realize that people in Gévaudan were subjected to two different species of attackers. The second reason is that in Gévaudan arbitrarily selected and killed wolves were presented as “the Beast”; particularly because an enormous cash reward could be acquired for the killing of the Beast. Therefore, some normal wolves, e.g. that one killed on 19 June 1767, were described as having strange, Beast-like characteristics; this confused even the researchers of the present day.

Several tricks were applied to make the Beast identity of killed wolves reasonably plausible. For example, pieces of cloth were (very probably) manoeuvred with a stick into the stomach of a female wolf, killed on 23 April 1765 and weighing only about 20 kilograms. One of the pieces was more than 30 centimetres long and about eight to ten centimetres wide (“more than a foot long and three or four inches wide”). 82 It is very improbable that this wolf, which had also allegedly eaten from a lamb and a hare, would have swallowed such a big piece of cloth. Furthermore, bones were found in the stomach of this wolf, which “appeared to us … to be some sort of human bone”;83 it was not specified which part of the human skeleton it came from. So, this little wolf was said to have preyed on three mammalian species within a short time: the examiners allegedly found body parts of all three species in the animal’s stomach, although the food passage through the digestive system of a wild living wolf normally takes only about twelve hours.84

In June 1767, the trickery reached an impressive level. On 19 June 1767, Jean Chastel, a farmer and inn-keeper of dubious reputation, killed a male wolf that had been in the company of a female wolf. Also this male was declared to be the Beast. On the occasion of the animal’s autopsy, the next day a procès-verbal was drawn up: a legal report written by authorized persons. The truth of procès-verbaux at the time of the Ancient Régime should not be overestimated. Regarding the procès-verbal written down on the occasion of the killing of a wolf in Gévaudan in September 1765 (again arbitrarily selected and then presented in Versailles as the “Beast of Gévaudan”) the historian Jay M. Smith concludes that no statement of the summoned illiterate eyewitnesses would have been incorporated into the procès-verbal which the minute keepers did not want to have there: any critical comment regarding the “Beast identity” of the killed wolf was undesired.85 Contrary to the claim of Linnell et al., there is no evidence in the procès-verbal that this wolf “was identified as being that responsible for attacking people from a series of scars inflicted by people that had defended themselves”: 86 instead, the animal was reported to have, apart from the deadly shot wounds, only one injury; and the eyewitness Marie-Jeanne Valet, who had hurt the Beast with a bayonet before and who was regarded as the sole person who could have inflicted this injury, “answered that she could not say where she had hurt it” (« elle a répondue qu’elle ne pouvoit déclarer où elle l’avoit blessée »).87,88

Because the raids of the Beast continued, although it had allegedly been killed, the procedure of September 1765 was imitated in June 1767 (again with the hunter’s prospect of earning glory and money); 26 witnesses allegedly confirmed without exception the identity of this wolf as the Beast. It is obvious that the description of this 16 wolf was bent in the procès-verbal so that a probably very normal wolf – normal in body size, morphology, and fur colour – seemed to have at least a few characteristics of the Beast. I already analysed the portrayal of the wolf in this procès-verbal, 89 therefore only a few details are emphasized here: the animal’s moderate head and body length of 127 centimetres allows us to exclude that this animal was the Beast. The animal lacked a tassel on the tail; and it had no dark stripe along its spine. The wolf’s head was declared to be monstrous, but the measurements given in the report point to normal head proportions. The claws were said to be much longer than those of common wolves; but, among the over 30 measurements of the animal’s morphology, there is no measurement of the claws. The described colours and patterns of the fur were obviously those usual for European wolves, including dark bands and a whitish heart-shaped spot on the chest.

A seemingly very important, but reluctantly formulated, piece of information is only briefly mentioned in the middle of a sentence about anatomical characters of the wolf: “… from the stomach a bone was taken which was said to be the head of the femur of a medium-aged child …” (« … tiré de l’estomac un os qu’ils ont dit être la tête d’un fémur d’un enfant de moyen âge … »). 90 However, there is no information about the identity of a killed or missing child at that time in that region.

Another weird aspect is that allegedly about 300 people of that region were asked to confirm the unusual appearance of the animal; obviously there was, according to Smith, “the need to get the story ‘right’”. 91 But there is also concrete evidence that a renowned expert for animals surveyed the carcass after it had been carried to Paris: the famous naturalist Comte de Buffon was reported to have concluded that it was “only a big wolf” (« ce n’était qu’un gros loup »). 92

The fact that it was Jean Chastel who killed this “Beast” is a curious coincidence. Two years before, Jean Chastel and two of his adult sons had come into an indirect but serious confrontation with François Antoine, the king’s gun-bearer. Louis XV had seconded François Antoine to Gévaudan with the order to kill the Beast. In August 1765, during a hunt, the three local Chastels tricked two of Antoine’s men into entering a dangerous swamp. The reason for this malice was obviously that the Chastels had reservations against the “strangers” from northern France who were interfering in local affairs. A scuffle between the two groups followed; firearms were brought in position. The confrontation ended without anybody being hurt; but after being informed about the incident, François Antoine sent the Chastels to jail. In September 1765, Antoine shot the wolf mentioned above; it was stuffed and presented at the court of Versailles as the “Beast of Gévaudan”. Antoine became a celebrated hero and received an enormous reward. But soon it was clear – not for the court, however, but for the people in Gévaudan – that the Beast was still alive. And in June 1767 it was Jean Chastel (he of all people), who demonstrated that not the étranger François Antoine, who had sent him to jail, but he, the local Jean Chastel, was the true Beast slayer and deliverer of his province.

It is unclear when the real Beast died. It is not certain that it was alive on 19 June, when Chastel shot the wolf. A deadly attack on the 19-year-old Jeanne Bastide on 17 June 1767, two days before the killing of Chastel’s wolf, is referred to as a wolf attack in the parish register. In perfect synchronisation with the alleged death of the Beast, 17 no Beast attack was recorded after the 19 June. However, Smith, one of the historians who only take wolves as Gévaudan attackers into account, notes that the attacks had found their end “at the close of summer 1767”.93

In Gévaudan, half a dozen killed wolves were classified as “the Beast”; even the descriptions of some living wolves were ‘adapted’. On 9 April 1767, a male wolf attacked two boys: the nine-year-old Étienne Loubat was killed, his companion badly hurt. Witnesses who chased the animal away from its victims identified it as a wolf; after the attack, it preyed on a lamb and dragged this to a smaller wolf; paw prints of both wolves were measured. The description of the attacking wolf, however, contained a few characteristics that had been reported about the Beast before, e.g. the front of the animal was described as stronger than the rear; and parts of the wolf’s fur were allegedly reddish. 94

The third reason why the identity of the species to which the Beast of Gévaudan belonged remained hidden for centuries is that eyewitnesses had observed claw imprints in the soil. A felid species was excluded until recent times, since nearly all cats have retractable claws. But the claw imprints were reported as having been found at the sites of attack, where the Beast had used its claws as weapons. Therefore, the curé Ollier, who examined the paw imprints of the Beast, had the impression that the Beast had claws only on its front paws.95 A lion was at any rate not taken into account by today’s researchers because it was taken for granted that people of the 18th century would be able to recognize a lion. This might be true for an old male with a fully developed mane, but not for a subadult animal. Furthermore, lions are considered to be a subtropical and tropical species that would not survive winters in the French Massif Central. However, lions are only restricted to warm climates because they were eradicated from temperate regions, e.g. from Greece; in the Atlas Mountains their paw prints were found up to 3500 metres in snow.96

 

[Stryker2011]

Excellent information, as always, Asta.