To French researcher Franz Jullien, taxidermist and collection manager of the Grand Evolution Gallery of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, here at last is part of the solution to the enigma. For him, “one” of the Beasts of the Gévaudan was obviously “this particular striped hyena.” Here are the key factors in Jullien’s hypothesis:
• Antoine Chastel, son of Jean Chastel, owned this animal (theoretically brought it to the Gévaudan region from Africa) as part of a menagerie and trained it to attack.
• What is certain is that when the Chastels were imprisoned in Saugues in 1765, the crimes ceased, but resumed soon after their release.
• Deaths apparently permanently ceased after Antoine’s father Jean finally killed the Beast in 1767 (according to witnesses, the animal also behaved in a strange manner in those final moments, as if it recognized the elder Chastel).
• Allegedly, Chastel brought his Beast to Versailles to show the king, but, owing to the poor condition of the animal’s remains, Louis ordered it to be buried immediately.
• According to Jullien, the animal killed by Chastel could not be buried in the gardens of Versailles. Parisian scientists, including naturalists Buffon and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, at this, the time of the Enlightenment, were on the lookout for unique discoveries. Further, the remains were kept in the king’s office (the building site of the future zoo and Jardin des Plantes, the botanical garden) after being studied by Buffon. Later it would have been mounted and included in the collections.
• Therefore, Chastel’s animal would have been the striped hyena responsible for the attacks in the Gévaudan, and later compared to the Indian specimen in the museum as discussed above.
• Guy Crouzet, the author of La grande peur du Gévaudan (Gévaudan’s Greatest Terror), 2001, agrees with Jullien’s thesis.
However Jullien’s hypothesis has been questioned in different ways:
• Folklorist and French researcher Michel Meurger suggests that this idea was at the time in tune with the historical context, but nothing justifies it beyond that time.
• If this was indeed a singular specimen, the remains of a fabulous Beast responsible for so many deaths, why wasn’t its skin or skull preserved or prepared for further conservation, especially if it was a specimen possibly acquired and mounted by the eminent Buffon? Wouldn’t the king himself be eager to exhibit this trophy in order to evidence the state’s success in dealing with this man-eating monster?
• As the second Beast autopsy indicates (see page 268), the composite morphology/anatomy of the animal shot by Chastel was a wolf-dog hybrid. If this animal was a striped hyena, its unique and distinctive morphology would have been recorded in the available autopsies.
• In Jay Smith’s book we read: “According to local lore … Chastel … arrived at Versailles and managed against all odds to secure a royal audience, whereupon the king promptly insulted Chastel and ordered the swift burial of his rotting and odoriferous creature.” It is not clear if Chastel actually got the chance to meet Louis XV, although Smith writes that this story seems to be one based on the memory of M. Estaniol, mayor of Saugues, and embellished as the years went on. It is also in part included in Pourcher’s book and Franz Jullien’s La deuxième mort de la Bête du Gévaudan: “Estaniol, who died in 1858, would recall hearing elderly locals of ancient memory agitatedly stating that only complots at court had deprived Jean Chastel of the honor of victory and the prize money promised to the man who defeated La Bête.”
• Too, why had nobody even talked, showed, pictured, illustrated, or exhibited this formidable killing hyena of the Gévaudan, a perfect contender for the Beast, until 1819, more than half a century after the events began to occur?
• According to Smith’s research, Chastel’s hyena/Beast apparently never entered the museum’s collection and Buffon never mentioned it (which seems odd if the specimen was so unique and notorious).
In a personal interview with Jullien at the National Museum of Natural History, he informed us that neither the alleged Gévaudan hyena (nor the Indian hyena) were part of the museum’s current collection. Both would have been very early examples of taxidermy and were probably damaged over time or destroyed by insects. The museum has specimens of striped hyena specimens on display and in storage, but these animals come from known and more recent sources.
***
From the fifteenth century into the nineteenth century, each summer a huge fair and international trade show was held in Beaucaire, France, attracting hundreds of thousands from Europe, Turkey, Greece, and the Middle East. The fair plays a role in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, and Napoleon wrote of a soldier’s conversation with merchants here in Supper in Beaucaire. Those who believed La Bête was a hyena speculate that it may have escaped from a menagerie at this fair.
***
Barnson cites a 1929 write-up in the Brioude Almanac, in which author C. Chacornac tells how a friend took advantage of a trip to Paris in order to view the Beast’s remains in the National Museum of Natural History. He was told the skin had lost its hair, and the remains had recently been discarded and burned, in keeping with state collections policy. Thompson also mentions that François Antoine’s Chazes wolf was the subject of an official painting, but this artwork seems also to have disappeared.
Between 1739 and 1752, acclaimed artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry painted eleven stunning life-size portraits of animals from the (live) royal menagerie at Versailles, including a famous rhinoceros named Clara, a lion, other cats, exotic birds, and a hyena. The suite of paintings was exhibited in 2007 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Regarding the painting entitled Hyena Attacked by Two Dogs, exhibition catalogue editor Mary Morton states, “the precision with which [the hyena] was painted indicates the painting must have been inspired by a live specimen.” In a 1750 letter written by Oudry, the artist says he painted his subjects from life. The portrait (more than four feet wide by six feet long) is of a striped hyena, though it was identified as a “Loup curvier de la Louisiane,” or a Louisiana lynx, in one 1739 exhibition, and as a “Lynx of the Menagerie … painted for the King” in a 1746 showing. It is believed Oudry placed the hyena in confrontation with two dogs in order to give prominence to the dark dorsal “crest” raised when the animal displays its “electrically charged defiance.” The Getty catalogue notes, too, that the hyena painting is the only animal-in-combat portrait in the suite and at least one expert has stated it was actually not part of the original commission Oudry received from Louis XV’s surgeon, François Gigot de La Peyronie. The paintings belong to the collection of the Staatliches Museum Schwerin in Germany.
Striped hyenas with erect mane (top) and normal (relaxed) position.
***
After reviewing the presented facts we are inclined to think that the hyena at the museum mentioned in the 1819 publication was simply a misidentification of some sort. There is a chance that it could represent a real hyena (sighted, or perhaps attacking people while temporarily free), perhaps an escaped animal from some menagerie, zoo, private collection, circus, etc., as has also been suggested. Another option is that it could have represented an animal smuggled into France aboard a merchant ship via the Mediterranean, maybe even already mounted, making its way to the museum collections after being purchased because of its exotic origin and nature. The connection could have been created simply because of the many rumors circulating at the time of the Beast and the historical artworks that represented the Beast of the Gévaudan as a hyena (because of its odd morphology). Therefore, in the early 1800s, a dubious stuffed museum specimen was linked with the Gévaudan in a remote and anecdotal way.
Weakest characteristics for Beast identity:
• Chastel’s La Ténazeyre Canid’s morphology differs too much from that of a striped hyena (color, stripes, etc.)
• Distinctive black throat patch
• Vertical stripes (5 to 9) on sides
• Clear black transverse and horizontal str
ipes on four legs
• Hunting abilities rather poor (simple chases and grabs at prey)
• Mostly nocturnal (active at night)
Strongest characteristics for Beast identity:
• Certain historical documents and artworks
• Capable of surviving in cold temperatures
• Former range (during the Pleistocene) includes most of Europe and France
• Attacks solitary humans at night, especially sleeping or unattended children and babies, or adults lying or sleeping uncovered in the open
• Known to excavate human graves, carrying away bones and/or remains (thus developing a taste for human flesh)
• Became extinct in Europe in recent historical times
Tables 1 and 2. Prehistoric and modern species discussed in this chapter, each with morphological, behavioral, and paleontological aspects, and percentage matches with the Beast of Gévaudan’s descriptive key features.
Prehistoric species
Wolf head, top, compared to a hyena. The latter species has a more conical appearance and distinctive rounded ears.
Modern species
CHAPTER 22
What of Wolves and Hybrids?
“The Beast … was … in all likelihood a large, powerfully built, highly intelligent, and undoubtedly somewhat warped representative of the species Canis lupus.”
—Richard H. Thompson
From all accounts, the Gévaudan overwhelmed hunters Duhamel, the d’Ennevals, and even François Antoine. Only Jean Chastel, a native, seems to have been at ease in his surroundings. When you consider wolf ecology, the region was the ideal habitat for Canis lupus. Wolves are built to thrive in and prefer cold weather; their coats provide insulation to forty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit and Celsius. They are extremely sure-footed; their paws have the capacity to spread and adjust to different types of terrain on the run, a boon in the variable Margeride mountains. The area provides plenty of rocky, secluded nooks in which to locate dens. Its high pinnacles and immense vistas would allow wolves to easily perceive animal and human activity.
La Bête traveled seemingly vast distances between attacks, but this seems to agree with what wildlife ecologists have learned of Canis lupus. An Alaskan pack of ten wolves was observed ranging an average of twenty-four miles between kills, from six to forty-five miles each time. Wolves in Isle Royale National Park, Michigan, would average twenty-three miles, and feed approximately every forty-eight hours. Wolf specialist L. David Mech states that “It appears at present under most conditions wolves hunt merely by traveling widely until they meet up with prey.” A November 2014 Associated Press news story reported that a female gray wolf from the Northern Rockies traveled hundreds of miles to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the first time Canis lupus had been seen in this area since the 1940s. The animal was killed months later by a hunter who mistook it for a coyote.
Optimal prey for wolves is an animal they can kill without risk, by stalking, by chance encounter, or by scent, says Mech. When they get close to their target, they abruptly surge in, seeking a direct hit. The prey animal may run; this prompts the wolf to give chase. If the animal is swifter than the reported speed of a wolf (twenty-five to forty miles per hour) they may escape, and the wolf ceases its pursuit. Wolves favor young, old, and injured prey. States Mech, “No doubt a lone wolf or even small packs would have to rely on only the very oldest and weakest moose.” Simply the sight of a potential target on the ground, resting or rolling on its back, etc., may initiate an attack.
Wolves use canines and incisors to kill, their mighty jaws applying up to 1,500 pounds of pressure per square inch. Their carnassials, or “shearing teeth,” then cut away “bite-size pieces.” The injuries inflicted on the people in the Gévaudan were as grisly as those inflicted by predators upon prey animals. Victims’ throats were slashed, limbs torn away. There were sixteen decapitations.
It has been said that perhaps this animal or animals acquired the taste from the flesh of fallen soldiers. There are accounts of instances in which wolves have consumed human cadavers. It is recorded that the corpses of the English vanquished by William the Conqueror were to be eaten by “worms, wolves, birds, and dogs—vermibus, atque lupis, avibus, canibusque voranda.” Scandinavian poets were said to have sung that Norman soldiers slaughtered by Danes in 1069 provisioned “a choice banquet for the Wolves of Northumberland.” Centuries later, in the New World, wolves ate bodies of Native American victims of smallpox. Famine-crazed wolves have also been known to disinter corpses from graves. In Scotland, in such cases, bodies were laid to rest on wolf-free islands off the coast, such as that of Handa, Green Island, and St. Mungo, or in lochs, such as Ross-shire.
In North America, Bruce Hampton, in researching the historical interactions of indigenous peoples with wolves, states that accounts of canid predations on humans generally took place in locations where buffalo were scarce or nonexistent, “suggesting that wolves may have been less of a threat to humans where natural prey was abundant.” French writer Jacques Delperrie de Bayac and others tell us that in the Gévaudan region, there was a loss of domestic prey through disease that decimated sheep herds in the 1700s.
Wolf expert Barry Lopez speaks of a “conversation of death,” the moment in which a wolf and its natural prey, such as a moose, make direct eye contact. The split-second interchange seems to determine whether the prey will stand firm or turn tail. In the story of the Beast, few victims were able to stand up to the Beast’s aggressions. There were cases when cattle and pigs resisted attacks and protected caregivers.
The Beast preferred certain organs and parts of its victims’ bodies. According to the Abbé Pourcher, “La Bête Féroce, it was said, did not eat the whole of the corpse only the liver, the heart, the intestines, and part of the head.” Perhaps this is akin to wolves that often stop eating after consuming select portions of cattle or sheep? Wild prey, on the other hand, is generally eaten in its entirety. According to a US government study conducted in Yellowstone National Park, a wolf pack cooperates in disemboweling a kill and first devours the most nutritious organs. Muscle tissue is the second course, hide and bone the third.
Super Wolves
Those interested in the lives of wolves have likely come across the work of wildlife writer Stanley P. Young. His stories of super wolves of North America, and of the US Bureau of Biological Survey hunters charged with exterminating them, have been for some readers compelling, for some melodramatic, and for many people for many years, convincing.
The 1970 book The Last of the Loners by Young, who was employed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service for forty-four years, profiles a number of “lobo wolves” with “almost unbelievable intelligence” that hunted livestock in Colorado and other locations in the early twentieth century, evading skilled Biological Survey hunters for months and years. With nicknames such as Old Lefty of Burns Hole and the Phantom Wolf of Big Salt Wash, these marauders were said to be both hated and admired by their human hunters, known as “wolfers.” The canids were not man-eaters, like the Beast, but were said to have destroyed tens of thousands of dollars worth of livestock in their careers. Like La Bête, they sidestepped traps, eschewed poison, and evaded bullets. Time and again, their hunters commented that they could not believe how savvy these canids were.
Because of their smarts, many of these lupine desperados supposedly grew older than typical wolves, old enough to become “gummers,” like three-footed Old Lefty of Burns Hole, Colorado (one of its feet was destroyed escaping from a trap), along with the Greenhorn wolf of Colorado, with “cruncher teeth worn down close to red sockets, … wolf fangs blunted and broken.” At that age, according to Young, all a famished wolf can do is go for its prey’s windpipe and hang on, and subsist on the easier-to-chew portions. A letter from a grateful stockman thanking Young for the destruction of outlaw wolves comments: “I presume that the fact of the she-wolf having a hind foot gone, and the he-one’s teeth being badly worn, accounts for their t
aste for calves more particularly than the older stuff.”
Like La Bête, the Custer Wolf of Custer, South Dakota (and parts of Wyoming) was said to be “not a wolf—not merely a wolf.” This individual had an entourage; a pair of coyotes (Canis latrans) that followed from a distance as the wolf went on supposed killing sprees and lone rambles (his mate had been extirpated by hunters). He was said to have ranged a circuit forty miles wide and sixty-five miles long. The Survey sent one of its best hunters after the Custer Wolf in March 1920; the wolfer did not succeed until October 11 of that year. After the hunter did so, locals gathered to see the remains of the renegade wolf (bringing to mind the displays of La Bête in Versailles and Courtaud in Paris). It turned out to be a white, ninety-eight pound specimen, “smaller than the average male wolf.”
According to contemporary biologists, however, Young’s yarns (some referenced in American congressional hearings related to control of predators) were likely embellished to develop support for control programs and should be cited with caution. The same is true for naturalist and writer Ernest Thompson Seton, perhaps most well known for the tragic story of “Lobo, the King of Currumpaw,” first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1895. However, some historians believe these tales are valuable in offering understanding, if not of wolves, of the culture of the United States in the early 1900s and the “coming together of science and folklore in a modern state bureaucracy.”
In any case, it turns out that, unlike the remains of the enigmatic La Bête, said to have been burned long ago, some of the remains of the now-called “Famous North American Wolves” exist. In 1998, in two studies, one published in Wildlife Society Bulletin and one in the Canadian Field-Naturalist, scientists studied famous wolves from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Findings may relate to the Beast.
Beast Page 18