What was the Beast of Gévaudan?

hi I'm the history guy I have a degree in history and I love history and a few love history too this is the channel for you between 1764 and 1767 a huge beast terrorized the population in an 80 kilometer square area of southeastern France it was described as being as big as a calf with a huge mouthful of razor-sharp teeth and in a three year period it killed more than a hundred people and if you think that this is just a myth or a legend it is not there were dozens of witnesses the attacks were well-documented whatever it was it was something real and while the attacks stopped in 1767 the Beast itself was never positively identified the Beast of Java dong is an enduring mystery of history and it deserves to be remembered the first attack occurred in the summer of 1764 a young woman who was watching a herd of cattle was charged by a huge Beast the likes of which she had never seen before but the Bulls in the herd managed to fend it off with their horns and so she escaped with mere scratches but she describes something fantastic a beast with a huge broad chest with a massive head in neck its ears were on top of its head and they stuck straight up looking almost like horns it's great hound like MA was full of massive fangs its tail unlike a wolf was long and thin it had huge claws and it moved extremely fast and when it ran it could leap enormous distances in each leap the Beast attacked dozens of more people in the coming months it seemed to favor women and children but it even attacked full-grown adult males it would often attack people that were alone in the field watching flocks or herds but it also came into towns and took victims mere feet from their own doorsteps if they were attacking the head and most of the victims that were found and had their throats torn out sometimes it would carrying the bodies away and virtually all of the bodies were at least partially eaten in these horrific scenes the beasts would sometimes leave behind just rent limbs and body parts and there were so many attacks that people became convinced that there must be more than one beast because some of the reports made it sound like there was more than one attack occurring at the same time astoundingly in October of 1764 two hunters claimed to have come upon the Beast and shot it with their muskets at close range several times each time to be staggered but astoundingly got up again and continued to move away eventually escaping into the woods and they were not the only ones who claimed to have shot the Beast at close range only to have it get up and walk away in 1765 the story reached the attention of the king Louis the 15th who sent several known wolf hunters as well as his own master of the hunt to hunt down and put an end to the beast they killed a lot of wolves and at least one extraordinarily large wolf but it turned out not to be the Beast the attacks resumed at least a dozen more people died in 1765 the beasts continued to terrorize the region clear until June of 1767 when a large hunt was organised by a local nobleman and a local farmer named Jean chaste L shot another huge wolf the attack stopped and so it was assumed that that was the Beast of Java da and Jean chaste Elle was a local hero it is a terrifying story but where all these attacks really just the result of one extraordinarily large wolf well there are lots of theories about the Beast to show vedalam but three are most credible the one that is most commonly accepted is that these attacks were simply the attacks of packs of wolves and that public hysteria exaggerated the description of the animals wolves were known to attack livestock in Europe and people as well wolves were responsible for at least thousands of deaths in Europe in the 16th 17th and 18th century but the patterns don't necessarily fit wolves generally attack weaker prey and very rarely attacks a full-grown humans could defend themselves an analysis of the attacks that were attributed to the beasts of Javadoc showed that that East attacked adults at a rate six times that of other known European wolf attacks and it would be extraordinarily strange for just wolves in one area to so gins their behavior for just that one three year period of time a second theory is that the Beast might have been a hybrid of a wolf and a dog possibly a mastiff and that the Beast might have been actually trained by someone to attack people some descriptions make it sound like maybe the Beast was even outfitted with armor that was made from boars hide which would explain why it could be shot and still run away also if it was trained and directed by a human that would explain why its targets were different than you would expect of normal wolf or dog attacks and the suspicion falls on the hero farmer Jean Castel who was known to own a very large red Mastiff now what his motive would have been is an interesting question but he did become quite the hero when he supposedly killed the Beast perhaps he was just a serial murderer who was covering up his own crimes or maybe he orchestrated the entire thing in order to get assistance in eradicating wolves who would have been a threat to his livestock a third theory was proposed recently by German naturalist Carl Hans talky-talky theorizes that the Beast of Gevaudan was in fact a sub-adult male lion that explains some things that the wolf or wolf dog explanations just don't explain like how it could leap long distances as it ran or its use of claws in attack something that wolves and dogs normally do not do and while a peasant of the 18th century likely knew what a lion was the pictures that they had seen the drawings would likely have been a full-grown adult male lions with full Mane's and the sub adult lion looks quite different it might not necessarily have been recognized the pattern seems to fit a sub-adult lion has a dark streak down its back of course the long and thin tail sounds more like a lion than a wolf's sub-adult Lions also sometimes have spots and the attack patterns and the victims that were chosen also are more fitting for a lion than they would be for a wolf buddy beasts of Java dawn was a lion how did it get to France well takis theory there is that it escaped from a menagerie scene in the 18th century there was a lot of interest in Natural Sciences and so it was quite popular for wealthy people to have collections of exotic animals the Beast of Java Don was likely brought to France as a lion cub that escaped and the terror of this particular explanation is that that means that the Beast of Java da who killed more than a hundred people was the result of human carelessness the Beast of Java Don is an enduring mystery and as there is no known genetic material that can be definitively tied to the beast we might never have a full answer but maybe exactly what the beast was is the wrong question maybe the more important question is what the story of the Beast of Java Don says about history at the time the Beast of Java Don was the first real national news story and it was greatly amplified by a nation news media that reveled in gory depictions of the attacks in crudely Illustrated printed broadsheets and so it is more than the story of an animal it's the story of people's perceptions of the attacks skewed by the politics of an unsettled era where the power structures and traditional modes of thought were in constant and sometimes violent transition it came in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment and following the Scientific Revolution and it represented the juxtaposition the conflict between superstition and science and people that were gripped in the conflicting ideas of a new scientific rationalism but also an obsession with the occult it represented the complexity of the relationships between the nobility and the peasantry and a time when those very relationships were under question literally on the doorstep of the French Revolution and it came in a period when religion and religious understanding was in flux and as organized religion which had caused many of the Wars of the previous century was being rejected there was still a belief in morality where God punished evil perhaps even by sending a terrifying beast and as the world was thrust into the modern era it might not matter whether the Beast of Java da was a wolf or a dog or a lion because the sum of the people's fears at the time could have transformed any of those into the terrifying beasts Osho vidoe on the history guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition my series 5 minutes of history short snippets have forgotten history 5 to 10 minutes long and if you didn't enjoy then please go ahead and click that thumbs up button that is there on your left if you have questions or comments would like to suggest another topic for the history guide then feel free to write those in the comment section and I'll be happy to respond and if you'd like five minutes more forgotten history then all you need to do is fit the 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Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 295,093

Rating: 4.9534531 out of 5

Keywords: history, the history guy, history guy, france, cryptozoology

Id: MATrLKCs71s

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2017