By Karl-Hans Taake

From 1764 to 1767, in the historical region of Gévaudan, located in southern France, and in adjacent areas, about one hundred children, youths, and women were killed by a so-called “Beast”. Numerous other humans survived the attacks, many of them seriously injured. The series of attacks has been confirmed by a great variety of historical documents and is not called into question by scientists.

Historians claim that wolves, or a hybrid of a wolf and a domestic dog, had attacked the victims; the “hybrid-assumption” is based on the description of a canid, shot in June 1767, that was said to have strange morphological characteristics. However, a critical evaluation of historical texts, including the publications of the French abbots François Fabre and Pierre Pourcher, revealed that neither this animal, nor any other wolf killed in Gévaudan, had anything to do with the attacks of the Beast. Nevertheless, there were, indeed, a few attacks of rabid and non-rabid wolves on humans in Gévaudan at that time.

Statistics of Beast Attacks

John D. C. Linnell et al., who published in 2002 a review of wolf attacks on humans, present the age distribution of human victims of wolves from the 18th to the 20th century. In their tables the attacks of the Beast are included, since they are considered as wolf attacks. However, if the table row “France 1764-1767” is excluded and analysed separately (nearly all data in this row refer to victims of the Beast), the following emerges: The Beast’s data show a drastic shift towards higher age. Grown-up victims of the Beast are proportionally six times more frequent than grown-up victims of wolves. Children under the age of ten, in contrast, are only represented by a third compared to the data for wolves. The victims of the Beast were older on average and therefore able to defend themselves more powerfully, they were heavier and energetically more “lucrative”. The Beast’s data are significantly different from the wolves’ data. Since the average prey size normally increases with the body size of predators, the data present indirect, but, nevertheless, clear evidence that the witnesses of that time had not exaggerated: they had encountered an animal that was much bigger than a wolf.