![]() ![]() Whatever the Beast was, its legend contributed to the ongoing werewolf panic in France and beyond. Some historians have seen a hyena in the descriptions of its attacks, while German biologist Karl-Hans Taake argues it was most certainly a young male lion. Something was indeed killing dozens of people in Gévaudan, but it wasn’t a werewolf.īeliefs about the Beast’s true nature have ranged from “a single enormous wolf,” John Knifton writes, perhaps infected with rabies, to “a number of wolves in a single pack… some type of enormous domestic dog, or perhaps even a wolf dog hybrid.” Between 17, half a dozen wolves were killed and said to be the Beast. Its attacks became so frequent and concerning that Louis XV offered up a bounty for its head. But the descriptions of the Beast of Gévaudan remain consistent over the course of dozens of eyewitness accounts, as do the injuries sustained by its victims. The many attacks over the centuries attributed to werewolves or some kind of supernaturally vicious and powerful creature were often the result of human killers or of other kinds of animals. In the most famous case of wolf terror, La Bête du Gévaudan, or the Beast of Gévaudan, supposedly killed and partially ate over 100 people in the span of three years, beginning in 1764. ![]() ![]() For 110 years, 30 thousand people were accused of being werewolves, tortured in exchange for their confessions, or lack of admission of guilt, and died at the stake.” The panic persisted long afterward. Would it be presumptuous to speculate that the routine killing of wolves contributed to a panic about werewolves that lasted from the early medieval period into the 18th century? This phenomenon was so pronounced in France at its peak that it has warranted a historical title: The French Werewolf Epidemic.Īs Dangerous Minds notes, the period between roughly 15 saw “France’s version of Europe’s witch trials and executions, but with werewolves. In France, wolf-killing became an official state function under Charlemagne in the 800s, with the formation of the louveterie, wolf hunters who operated (with a few years off after the Revolution) until the late 1880s. “We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be” wrote naturalist Farley Mowat, “the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourselves.” The fear of wolves in the European psyche dates back over a millennium, during which time wild populations of wolves were slaughtered until the animals had gone all but extinct on the continent by the early 20th century. For the werewolf, for the werewolf have sympathyīecause the werewolf he is someone just like you and me ![]()
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