After reading a passing reference to the feared Beast of Gevaudan, I decided to investigate further. After a half hour of Internet research, I ended up with about a half dozen wildly conficting stories.
So, what’s the Straight Dope on the Beast of Gevaudan, if any?
There isn’t any straight dope on it; there’s a bunch of “eye-witness” accounts by French peasants and wolf hunters, virtually all of which contain exaggeration, contamination from other accounts, and outright lies. La Bête is credited with something like 100 killings, but many appear to be disappearances, some are mere rumors, and yet others are probably ordinary homicides covered up by pinning them on the local monster. There may very well have been a large wolf that killed several people in Auvergne, and there may have been several other wolves attacking people and sheep during those few years, but the rest of the speculation strikes me as hysterical. Some claim that consistency between descriptions of the critter are un-wolflike, and that some displaced hyena or other foreign predator was responsible, but there’s no telling now.