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Biology of the "Beast of Gévaudan": Morphology, Habitat Use, and Hunting

Behaviour of an 18 th Century Man-Eating Carnivore

Preprint · October 2020

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.17380.40328

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Taake, Karl-Hans (2020). Biology of the “Beast of Gévaudan”: Morphology, Habitat Use, and
Hunting Behaviour of an 18th Century Man-Eating Carnivore. ResearchGate.

Biology of the “Beast of Gévaudan”: Morphology, Habitat Use, and

Hunting Behaviour of an 18th Century Man-Eating Carnivore

Karl-Hans Taake

Abstract: The extensive information handed down by witnesses in the 18th century with
regard to a carnivore that killed approximately one hundred people in Gévaudan and in
bordering regions (Southern France) from 1764 to 1767 is summarized. The reported
morphological and behavioural characteristics of the animal contradict the widespread
assumption that “the Beast” (la Bête) was a synonym for man-eating wolves (Canis
lupus). The details which have been passed on about the physique of the Beast, the
descriptions of its fur, its prey selection, its predatory attack behaviour, its handling of
human victims, as well as its response to the pressure imposed by hunters, indicate that
the Beast was a single animal that is identifiable as a subadult male lion (Panthera leo).
The identification of this animal as Canis lupus contradicts basic zoological knowledge.

Table of Contents

Morphology ........................................................................................................................................................... 1
Habitat use ............................................................................................................................................................ 3
Wolf territories.................................................................................................................................................... 5
Attacking and handling victims .................................................................................................................... 5
Selection of human prey .................................................................................................................................. 7
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................................. 9
References ............................................................................................................................................................. 9

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 (Photos 1 and 2).

1
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

Criteria Description

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

2
 Photo 1: Subadult male lion in Namibia, Southern Africa, with a dark
“Mohawk” mane at the nape of its neck.
(Henk Bogaard/shutterstock.com)

Photo 2: A dark line along the spine, either continuous or

interrupted, occurs in lions in several variants, including differences
in the width and length of the line. Male lion in Zimbabwe, Southern
Africa. (Anton Ivanov/shutterstock.com)

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

3
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.

Photo 3: The plateaus of the Margeride were the Beast’s preferred

habitat. (Marc Poveda/shutterstock.com)

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

4
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.

5
 Figure 1: This picture probably shows the
deadly attack on Marianne Hébrad on 6
August 1764 at St-Jean-La-Fouilhouse near
Mende,60 as it was observed, according to
the text under the picture, by an abbé Petit.
The text says, among other things, that there
were too few villagers to helpfully intervene
and that there should be no doubt about the
appearance of the animal. (Date: 1764;
Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Figure 2: Other contemporary illustrations

depict the Beast as a wolf, a hyena (the
alleged hyena shown here), or as an
unidentifiable fantastic creature. Some
pictures, including this one, show traits
which eyewitnesses had reported from the
Beast: e.g. an enormous body size; the
stronger front of the animal as compared to
its rear side; long claws; a whitish
underside; and a long, tufted tail. (Date:
about 1765; Wikimedia Commons, public
domain)

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

6
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

7
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.

70
60
50
Percent

40 up to 9 years
30 10 to 18 y.
20 over 18 y.
10
0
1764 1765 1766 1767
(N=15) (N=39) (N=7) (N=12)

Figure 3: Percentage of fatalities per age group in the years 1764 to 1767. The
respective total of the fatalities, as far as the victims’ ages are known, is in brackets.
The proportion of the 10 to 18-year-old victims accounts in all years for at least half
of all fatalities; compared to the other two age groups, it varies the least. In 1764, the
Beast killed no child under the age of 10 years; the proportion of the oldest age
group was highest in this year. It should be noted that the attacks of the years 1764
and 1767 each refer only to a half-year: in 1764 it is the second half, in 1767 the first
half. Although no person over the age of 18 was killed in 1766, there were a few
attacks on adults that year. (Database for the figure above: Moriceau, 2008: La bête
du Gévaudan;72 victims with the specification “enfant”, which cannot be assigned
exactly to an age group, and two wolf attacks are discounted in the figure).

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

8
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

References

1 Moriceau, Jean-Marc (2008). La bête du Gévaudan. L'histoire comme un roman. Larousse. pos.
4165.
2 Smith, Jay M. (2011). Monsters of the Gévaudan. The Making of a Beast. Harvard University

Press. p. 93.
3 Pourcher, Pierre (2007). The Beast of Gévaudan. La Bête du Gévaudan. Translated by Derek

Brockis. AuthorHouse. p. 45.

4 Fabre, François (2002): La bête du Gévaudan. Edition complétée par Jean Richard. De Borée. p.

139.
5 Smith 2011, p. 205.

9
6 Smith 2011, p. 73.
7 Smith 2011, p. 188.
8 Fabre 2002, p. 17.
9 Fabre 2002, p. 28.
10 Moriceau 2008, pos. 1300, 1348.
11 Smith 2011, pp. 39, 186.
12 Pourcher 2007, pp. 44, 113.
13 Fabre 2002, p. 17.
14 Fabre 2002, p. 28.
15 Fabre 2002, p. 17.
16 Fabre 2002, p. 16.
17 Smith 2011, p. 184.
18 Pourcher 2007, p. 44.
19 Smith 2011, p. 188.
20 Pourcher 2007, p. 23.
21 Smith 2011, p. 205.
22 Smith 2011, p. 94.
23 Pourcher 2007, p. 44.
24 Moriceau 2008, pos. 1838.
25 Fabre 2002, p. 16.
26 Fabre 2002, p. 142.
27 Fabre 2002, pp. 50, 65.
28 Pourcher 2007, pp. 139 f., 152, 301, 367.
29 Pourcher 2007, pp. 73, 242.
30 Pourcher 2007, p. 44.
31 Fabre 2002, p. 28.
32 Fabre 2002, p. 17.
33 Pourcher 2007, p. 44.
34 Fabre 2002, p. 17.
35 Moriceau 2008, pos. 1840.
36 Pourcher 2007, p. 113.
37 Pourcher 2007, p. 281.
38 Smith 2011, p. 209.
39 Pourcher 2007, pp. 19 f., 262 ff.
40 Smith 2011, p. 73.
41 Pourcher 2007, p. 44.
42 Smith 2011, p. 72.
43 Smith 2011, p. 212.
44 Pourcher 2007, p. 242.
45 Todaro, Giovanni (2013). The Maneater of Gévaudan. When the Serial Killer Is an Animal.

Lulu.com. pos. 3311.

46 Pourcher 2007, p. 232.
47 Pourcher 2007, p. 363.
48 Pourcher 2007, p. 19.
49 Fabre 2002, pp. 132, 140.
50 Pourcher 2007, p. 174.
51 Moriceau, Jean-Marc (2016). Histoire du méchant loup : La question des attaques sur l'homme

en France XVe-XXe siecle. Pluriel. pp. 194 ff.

52 Moriceau 2016, pp. 214 ff.

10
 53 Smith 2011, p. 237.
54 Moriceau 2008, pos. 3295.
55 Pourcher 2007, p. 24.
56 Smith 2011, p. 87.
57 Smith 2011, p. 92.
58 Smith 2011, p. 15.
59 Moriceau 2008, pos. 318.
60 Geneanet.org: Marianne Hebrad.

https://gw.geneanet.org/ddebos?lang=en&n=hebrard&oc=3&p=marianne
61 Moriceau 2008, pos. 1045.
62 Fabre 2002, pp. 63, 72.
63 Pourcher 2007, pp. 54, 168, 282.
64 Fabre 2002, Tableau des victimes de la Bête.
65 Moriceau 2008, pos. 607.
66 Moriceau 2008, pos. 4167.
67 Fabre 2002, pp. 71 f.
68 Taake, Karl-Hans (2020). Carnivore Attacks on Humans in Historic France and Germany: To

Which Species Did the Attackers Belong? ResearchGate. p.10.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339458501_Carnivore_Attacks_on_Humans_in_Hi
storic_France_and_Germany_To_Which_Species_Did_the_Attackers_Belong
69 Taake 2020, pp. 12 f.
70 Linnell, J. D. C. et al. (2002). The Fear of Wolves: A Review of Wolf Attacks on Humans. Norsk

Institutt for Naturforskning (NINA). Table 7.

https://www.nina.no/archive/nina/PppBasePdf/oppdragsmelding/731.pdf
71 Taake 2020, p. 13, Figure 3.
72 Moriceau 2008, Liste des victimes tuées de 1764 à 1767, 1. Décès retenus.
73 Smith 2011, p. 204.
74 Pourcher 2007, pp. 357 f.
75 Smith 2011, p. 180.
76 Taake 2020, p. 17.
77 Fabre 2002, p. 17.
78 Robbins, Louise E. (2002). Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in

Eighteenth-Century Paris. Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 37 ff.

79 Moriceau 2016, pp. 147 ff.
80 Taake 2020, pp. 9 f.

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