By: Sabine Lechtenfeld

Sabine Lechtenfeld — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 16:05:30 +0000

Thanks a lot for the article☺
The Beast Of Gevaudan has become a bit of a hobby of mine ever since I saw the lurid but somehow extremely entertaining French movie “The Brotherhood of the Wolves”. I was stunned to discover that the apparently totally far fetched and sensational plot was based on a well documented true story. But as crazy as it seems, the movie may have gotten one very important detail right: the species of The Beast. In the movie it seems to be a big exotic cat – most likely a lion, although we only see it dressed up in some kind of crazy armor.
A few years ago the German biologist Karl-Hans Taake has put together a very convincing case – in an article for National Geographic and in a booklet, too – that The Beast may have been a not quite mature male lion whose developing mohawk-like mane has been mistaken for spikes and has prevented a correct identification. Taake has sifted through all the available documents of the case as well as documented authentic sightings and credible descriptions. That’s actually quite a lot of useful material. And the case for a (wo)man-eating lion having been on the loose in the rural Gevaudan area is indeed very strong. The Beast has actually been seen up close by many eyewitnesses numerous times, and it’s highly unlikely that the inhabitants of this area wouldn’t have reckognized a wolf or a dog/wolf hybrid. Also the sheer physical strength of The Beast which has been described, vastly exceeded anything even the strongest wolf can do. The behavior and prey selection was also totally unlike anything wolves would do, and the mutilated and half-eaten victims strongly resembled victims of man-eating lions. These man-eaters can be very cunning and may become increasingly daring once they find out by experience that humans are easy prey. There are many similarities to a few spectacular documented cases, like the famous man-eaters of Tsavo: a pair of maneless male lions who managed to hold up the construction of a British railway project in Kenia for several months because they boldly feasted upon the railway workers. They were surprisingly intelligent and very hard to bring down. Because of their almost supernatural luck the locals thought of them as spirits and named them “The Ghost and The Darkness”. And, yes, that’s also a very captivating movie?
Karl-Hans Taake considers the area and the time before the French Revolution and explains that menageries and the trade with exotic animals were becoming en vogue. It’s not inconceivable that an exotic big cat has escaped and the owner didn’t report it when it started to kill people. Personally I think it’s also quite possible that an exotic big cat has been set free deliberately for various reasons. The owner may not have been able to handle and feed it when it wasn’t a cuddly cub anymore. Or at the age of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who made the first modern back-to-nature movement fashionable, a curious animal owner wanted to find out if a lion as a glorious apex predator could prevail in the French wilderness. Both motives aren’t far fetched at all and unfortunately still motivate owners of exotic pets to dump them – sometimes with dire consequences for a local ecosystem like the Florida Everglades where escaped or dumped pet pythons multiplied like crazy . There’s also a long running discussion if the continued sightings of alien big cats in rural England could be based on a grain of thruth since many big cat owners may have dumped their pets when a new legislation from 1976 made it very expensive and difficult to own them legally.
The Beast Of Gevaudan may well have been a historical case of a so-called ABC – an Alien Big Cat!

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By: Sabine Lechtenfeld