Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast.
Speaker 2: Who's upbraid on the Big Bad Wolf, Big Bad Wolf,
Speaker 2: Big Bad Wolf?
Speaker 3: Loose afraid of the Big Bad Wolf. Ba lull la la.
Speaker 4: It's late at night and you're on your way through
Speaker 4: the woods. A full moon casts a blue white light
Speaker 4: across the sky, making the trees around you look like
Speaker 4: skeletons reaching up into the crisp autumn air. And then
Speaker 4: you hear the sound of animals in the dark around you, growls,
Speaker 4: running paws, crunching dead leaves. In that moment, it will
Speaker 4: probably be far from your mind that all those documentaries
Speaker 4: you saw about wolves say they don't attack humans. As
Speaker 4: you run, and you would run, you might think about
Speaker 4: how far you have to go to get the safety,
Speaker 4: or you might think about whether your clothes can protect
Speaker 4: you from their teeth. Or you might find that you're
Speaker 4: not thinking at all, that your mind's given over to
Speaker 4: the lightning flashes of instinct that take over when you're
Speaker 4: in mortal peril. Maybe you wouldn't notice that the pack
Speaker 4: is split and some of the wolves are now in
Speaker 4: front of you. Maybe you would never feel the wet
Speaker 4: of your own urine, which is now spilled down your legs,
Speaker 4: and maybe you'd never consider the word that describes you
Speaker 4: best in this scenario. There, despite all your education, despite
Speaker 4: all your stamina, despite all your elaborate hopes and dreams,
Speaker 4: in this scenario you can be accurately summed up in
Speaker 4: a single word, pray. Okay, it's actually quite unlike anything
Speaker 4: we've ever seen before.
Speaker 5: A giant, very creature.
Speaker 1: Part eight, Part Matt.
Speaker 6: In Luckness, a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake
Speaker 6: in the Highlands of Scotland.
Speaker 1: Get the creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 3: Monstertal.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 4: Blake Smith, and today with my co host Ben Radford,
Speaker 4: we're going to talk about something that's probably going to
Speaker 4: make some of our listeners upset. If you find the
Speaker 4: contents of today's episode or controversial or frustrating, please come
Speaker 4: talk to us about it at our Monster Dog fan
Speaker 4: page on Facebook or send us an email. Our contact
Speaker 4: information is available at MonsterTalk dot org. So what's this
Speaker 4: controversial monster? The man eating wolf? For years, I'd been
Speaker 4: fascinated by the legend of the Beasts of Jevadan and
Speaker 4: was so curious as to what killed these people in
Speaker 4: France in the seventeen sixties. But as it became a
Speaker 4: skeptic of various cryptozoological topics, I began to question the
Speaker 4: story itself.
Speaker 5: Where there are really any deaths at all? And the
Speaker 5: answer is yes, there were.
Speaker 4: There were many of them, and they were horrible, and
Speaker 4: the likely culprit, as our interview will explain, was wolves.
Speaker 4: A weird rift exists between the off repeated story that
Speaker 4: wolves are essentially beautiful and harmless and the fact that
Speaker 4: they are apex predators who have to kill animals to live,
Speaker 4: humans are animals, and where humans interface with wolves, the
Speaker 4: risk of conflict exists. Now, wolves are beautiful to me,
Speaker 4: but despite the t shirts and posters with wolves as
Speaker 4: a symbol of nature's savagery and strength, they do sometimes
Speaker 4: kill people.
Speaker 5: I'm going to be revisiting this top on another episode.
Speaker 4: I had originally wanted to make this a double length show,
Speaker 4: but decided to split it into two episodes instead because
Speaker 4: the link of this interview and the complexity of the
Speaker 4: topic made it impossible to get it all together. So
Speaker 4: today we'll be focusing on what's one of the most
Speaker 4: famous instances of repeat wolf attacks and recorded history, a
Speaker 4: case where the legend insists that there was a single, mysterious, powerful, unusual,
Speaker 4: and perhaps diabolic creature to blame, a creature so renowned
Speaker 4: for its powers and savagery that an entire country knew
Speaker 4: it shorthand as labitte, or as the English would say, the.
Speaker 5: Beast more monstertle.
Speaker 4: Today we're talking with author J Smith, who is a
Speaker 4: history professor at the University of.
Speaker 5: North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Speaker 4: His expertise is in French history, and he's the author
Speaker 4: of the book Monsters of the Javel Dawn The Making
Speaker 4: of a Beast. And hopefully I pronounced that correctly, pretty close,
Speaker 4: all right, how should it best be pronounced?
Speaker 7: Don't you wouldn't actually you wouldn't actually pronounce.
Speaker 5: The end the end at the end?
Speaker 3: Okay, good enough?
Speaker 1: Yeah, but very close. Excellent, excellent.
Speaker 5: Well, I just want to say that I.
Speaker 4: Rarely do I pick up a book about monsters and
Speaker 4: find myself so educated. I've learned so much reading this
Speaker 4: so far, and uh, I between, I must just close.
Speaker 4: I have not completely finished it, but I'm absolutely going
Speaker 4: to This has been fabulous.
Speaker 5: Uh And and.
Speaker 4: Really I'll probably cut that part out so that the
Speaker 4: audience doesn't know. But I mean, seriously, this is just
Speaker 4: a really really interesting and uh engaging read.
Speaker 5: So thank you for that.
Speaker 1: Oh well, thank you.
Speaker 6: So let me let me just throw in my two cents,
Speaker 6: because I mean, I am, like Blake and many of
Speaker 6: our listeners, a monster fishonado and I've got a bookshelf
Speaker 6: a full of books on monsters of various types and sorts,
Speaker 6: and you know, from different approaches, from iconography to history
Speaker 6: and when rolns, and this really is one of the
Speaker 6: best I've read.
Speaker 3: I mean just in terms of just a.
Speaker 6: Really clear, crystal crystal clear examination of the history and
Speaker 6: the circumstances behind it.
Speaker 3: It was. It's a great book.
Speaker 7: Well, thanks so much for saying that, because when I
Speaker 7: set out to do this book, I was really trying
Speaker 7: to thread the needle. I wanted to write a book
Speaker 7: that would appeal to historians of France and specialists of
Speaker 7: the eighteenth century, but I also wanted to write an
Speaker 7: engaging book that the non specialists would also find a
Speaker 7: lot of interest in. So I'm going to take your
Speaker 7: words as an indication that maybe I happily succeeded.
Speaker 5: Oh you succeeded for sure.
Speaker 4: So but why don't you give us your perspective on
Speaker 4: the story of what is this beast of Jevo Da
Speaker 4: and how did you become interested in it? So what
Speaker 4: is the story? What's the basics story?
Speaker 7: Well, the basic story began in the late spring or
Speaker 7: early summer of seventeen sixty four, when a mysterious or
Speaker 7: unknown creature began to attack and kill peasant women and
Speaker 7: children in this remote region of southern France, women and
Speaker 7: children who were tending to their flocks or their their
Speaker 7: herds of cattle, taking them to and from streams.
Speaker 1: And over the.
Speaker 7: Course of the summer of seventeen sixty four, as the
Speaker 7: casualties began to mount, it dawned on the people of
Speaker 7: the je Vaudon that this was an unusual occurrence. There's
Speaker 7: something out of the ordinary here. And so as word
Speaker 7: of the ravages spread throughout the region, the beast, still unknown,
Speaker 7: also acquired a whole stock of fascinating characteristics. All sorts
Speaker 7: of strange things were said about it. It was not
Speaker 7: always described exactly in the same way. In fact, there
Speaker 7: was a good deal of variation between the accounts that
Speaker 7: were given, but a stock of interesting characteristics was compiled
Speaker 7: over the course of the summer, so much so that
Speaker 7: news of the story eventually spread to Paris and the
Speaker 7: cities of northern France and northern Europe, Amsterdam, London, and
Speaker 7: so on, and by the end of seventeen sixty four
Speaker 7: it had become a riveting international news story because of
Speaker 7: not only the continuing ravages of the beast, but also
Speaker 7: the strange things that were said about it. And so
Speaker 7: as seventeen sixty five dawned and the ravages continued, France
Speaker 7: found itself kind of embroiled in an international news story,
Speaker 7: one of the first of its kind, really, and that
Speaker 7: continued throughout seventeen sixty five. Well throughout most of seventeen
Speaker 7: sixty five, it sort of petered out. Interest in the
Speaker 7: story petered out late in the fall, when there was
Speaker 7: a kind of well a false ending to the story,
Speaker 7: when Francois Antoine, who was the royal gun bearer who
Speaker 7: had been dispatched to the Javaldon by King lou of
Speaker 7: the fifteenth killed a large wolf and basically decided with
Speaker 7: a handful of co conspirators that we were going to
Speaker 7: have to call this the Beasta di Chavaldon. Put an
Speaker 7: end to this thing. So they embalmed it. They embalmed it,
Speaker 7: they sent it back to Versaille, they paraded it before
Speaker 7: the king, and even though everyone could see that there
Speaker 7: was nothing all that extraordinary about this creature, there was
Speaker 7: just a kind of tacit understanding that this story had
Speaker 7: to be brought to an end. And so it was
Speaker 7: more or less officially declared that the Beasta of di
Speaker 7: Jaevaldon had been conquered.
Speaker 1: But that was really.
Speaker 7: Only the end of the large and very important phase
Speaker 7: one of the story, because in December seventeen sixty five,
Speaker 7: the attacks resumed, and over the course of the next
Speaker 7: eighteen months, another two dozen people were killed in more
Speaker 7: or less the same fashion and in more or less
Speaker 7: the same locale where the attacks had been concentrated throughout
Speaker 7: seventeen sixty five. And so, of course the people of
Speaker 7: the Jevaudon saw the whole story as one undifferentiated experience.
Speaker 7: They did not believe that the beast of the je
Speaker 7: Vadal was conquered. In September of seventeen sixty five. It
Speaker 7: was clear to them that it had not been, and
Speaker 7: so the real end of the story didn't come until
Speaker 7: June of seventeen sixty seven when a local huntsman, Jean Chastelle,
Speaker 7: killed a large wolf and the ravages did indeed stop
Speaker 7: after that. So that, in a nutshell, is the actual story. Now,
Speaker 7: what was the beast? I think it's almost certain that
Speaker 7: it was a wolf or wolves, and that's just based
Speaker 7: on all of the considerable circumstantial evidence about wolf attacks
Speaker 7: in early modern Europe from the sixteenth through late eighteenth centuries,
Speaker 7: we know that thousands of people died because of wolf attacks,
Speaker 7: and not only through rabies infected wolves, but perfectly healthy wolves.
Speaker 4: What's interesting is Ben and I had actually been researching
Speaker 4: this for more than a year, I guess, before your
Speaker 4: book came out, And like one of the things we
Speaker 4: tell our listeners is we start you really should always
Speaker 4: start with the null hypothesis. You know, what's the evidence
Speaker 4: that there was a beast or that people even died
Speaker 4: at all? And in this case, in fact, why don't
Speaker 4: I actually ask you that? So I know that it
Speaker 4: isn't a null hypothesis? But what is the evidence for
Speaker 4: all these deaths?
Speaker 7: Well, most of the evidence takes the form of burial
Speaker 7: notices composed by local cures who at the time at
Speaker 7: the time that they they wrote out and registered the
Speaker 7: burial notice usually described the body and hypothesized the cause
Speaker 7: of death, and consistently throughout seventeen sixty four seventeen sixty five,
Speaker 7: they would attribute the death of this or that young
Speaker 7: shepherdess to labetferros, the ferocious beast, this beast that has
Speaker 7: been terrorizing us for x number of months. Sometimes sometimes
Speaker 7: the wounds were described as the bite of a wolf
Speaker 7: or the ravages of a wolf. More often, the bodies
Speaker 7: were described as having been savaged by the ferocious beast,
Speaker 7: simply that this animal that we know we're contenting with.
Speaker 7: So we do know that over one hundred people died
Speaker 7: and scores more were attacked over a three year period.
Speaker 7: We do have documentary evidence that the deaths occurred. This
Speaker 7: is not make believe, and it was. It is certain
Speaker 7: that these deaths were caused by some ferocious creature, because
Speaker 7: there are enough eyewitness accounts of savaged bodies and decapitations
Speaker 7: and grisly disembowelments. So we know the deaths occurred. We
Speaker 7: know that they would have been shocking to witness. It's
Speaker 7: not hard to understand why the locals would have been
Speaker 7: very energized by this whole phenomenon and would have been
Speaker 7: led to imagine that they were facing a monster, not
Speaker 7: hard to imagine at all. But what they did not know,
Speaker 7: What they could not really know, given the state of
Speaker 7: knowledge about the European wide phenomenon, was that big, bad
Speaker 7: wolves were roaming all over the forests of Europe, killing
Speaker 7: people in very large numbers in the thousands, and the
Speaker 7: people of the Javaldon would not have even known necessarily
Speaker 7: of earlier, very similar episodes in recent French history. In
Speaker 7: the sixteen nineties to seventeen thirties the seventeen fifties, there
Speaker 7: had been other episodes very like this, not quite as
Speaker 7: extreme and not quite as long lasting, but very similar
Speaker 7: in character in the Leone region, in the Swassanee, which
Speaker 7: is just to the northeast of Paris, in the the Mouzan,
Speaker 7: which is not even all that far from the Chevodon.
Speaker 7: But the peasants of the Jaevodon would have known about this.
Speaker 7: I mean, they were illiterate, they were isolated, they live
Speaker 7: in a remote region, and so it's understandable that they
Speaker 7: would have all and back on folkloric explanations and superstitious
Speaker 7: lore to account for the horror they were living through.
Speaker 7: It perfectly understandable.
Speaker 6: Well, let me let me fall up on that, because
Speaker 6: I actually researched a monster called the chupicabra, and I
Speaker 6: had the benefit of the creature being a fairly recent
Speaker 6: phenomenon still going on today. So I could you know,
Speaker 6: I could interview eye witnesses, I could go to the
Speaker 6: locations where they were. But in your case, I mean,
Speaker 6: you're dealing with something two hundred and fifty years ago, right,
Speaker 6: so you know you can't go to night witness and
Speaker 6: interview her and figure out what's going on. So, I mean,
Speaker 6: I've done a fair amount of historical research in some
Speaker 6: aspects in my own stuff, But how did you tackle
Speaker 6: the task of researching it from that point of view?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I've read your book, by the way, and I
Speaker 7: really enjoyed it, thank you. Yeah, because this was regarded
Speaker 7: even at the time, was regarded at the time as
Speaker 7: an unusual occurrence. Lucky for me, the historian who wanted
Speaker 7: to kind of reconstruct the story. It was very heavily documented.
Speaker 7: The officials who were engaged in the hunts and all
Speaker 7: of the hunters who came in sequence to search out
Speaker 7: this monstrous creature wrote copious correspondents to each other, to
Speaker 7: officials back in their SI, to officials in Montpellier, which
Speaker 7: was the administrative capital of the province. And in addition
Speaker 7: to the very dense correspondence of all of these officials,
Speaker 7: there was a great deal of newspaper coverage, much of
Speaker 7: which really all of which needs to be taken with
Speaker 7: the grain of salt. You have to read it very carefully.
Speaker 7: But if you do put your skeptical lens on and
Speaker 7: read the newspaper coverage carefully and compare different accounts in
Speaker 7: different newspapers, you can pick up the basic details and
Speaker 7: pieced together the sequence of events in a more or
Speaker 7: less reliable fashion. So that's how I was able to
Speaker 7: do it. It just happens to be an incredibly well
Speaker 7: documented story, one that, oddly enough, was largely ignored by
Speaker 7: historians for two centuries. But it was a very well
Speaker 7: documented case.
Speaker 3: Well, let me ask you about that.
Speaker 6: I mean, your book is clearly the result of an
Speaker 6: amazing amount of careful scholarship and research. So how long
Speaker 6: did it take you to write the book and what
Speaker 6: drew you to it and decided, Hey, I want to
Speaker 6: spend an enormous amount of time and effort and money
Speaker 6: tackling this.
Speaker 7: I think this is a great story. Though I have
Speaker 7: told it so often, I've begun to wonder about its veracity.
Speaker 7: But I think this is the way it happened. I
Speaker 7: was looking through images from the seventeen sixties in the
Speaker 7: French National Library back in the summer of two read
Speaker 7: because I was finishing up work on another book, and
Speaker 7: the seventeen sixties happened to figure in this other book,
Speaker 7: and so I wanted some illustrations from that period for
Speaker 7: that book. And I stumbled on these engravings from seventeen
Speaker 7: sixty four that depicted this ghastly creature, and I saw
Speaker 7: that it was labeled La bete douche Vadon the Beast
Speaker 7: of the je Vadon. And all of these engravings, theyre
Speaker 7: about a dozen or so of them, had extensive captions
Speaker 7: that allowed me to piece together a narrative of the
Speaker 7: beast's exploits over a period of several months, almost a
Speaker 7: year in fact.
Speaker 1: And it dawned on me that.
Speaker 7: Here was a story from the mid seventeen sixties that
Speaker 7: had captivated the French for over a year, had led
Speaker 7: artists to produce beautiful, finally detailed engraving of this obviously fantastical,
Speaker 7: mythical creature, and I soon learned after had also generated
Speaker 7: lots of newspaper coverage. And yet I knew next to
Speaker 7: nothing about it. And so I immediately recognized two things.
Speaker 7: Here was an intrinsically interesting story that I wanted to
Speaker 7: know more about, and that I thought readers would enjoy
Speaker 7: learning more about. And how funny it is that I,
Speaker 7: as a specialist of the eighteenth century, know next to
Speaker 7: nothing about this creature. How is this possible? And so
Speaker 7: I was doubly drawn to the story. I could see
Speaker 7: it was an interesting story just on its own merits.
Speaker 7: But I also was curious to learn the history of
Speaker 7: the story, not just the history of the beast, but
Speaker 7: the history of the story. How the story itself had
Speaker 7: been well more or less driven underground, I would say,
Speaker 7: in the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century.
Speaker 7: So it turned out and then and then re emerged
Speaker 7: in a fantastical form in the twentieth century, but in
Speaker 7: a way that historians weren't interested in noticing or writing about.
Speaker 7: I mean, that's why I knew nothing about it. You
Speaker 7: don't find descriptions of the beast of the je Vadon
Speaker 7: and French history books, not those written by French scholars
Speaker 7: or Anglo American scholars. It's just it's absent, and so
Speaker 7: I was drawn to it for both of those reasons.
Speaker 4: I just recently went to Disney and Epcot, and you know,
Speaker 4: they have at Epcot a French section with a lot
Speaker 4: of French people working there, many of many from France,
Speaker 4: not just people who speak French, Quebec or whatever. And
Speaker 4: so I did this extremely unscientific thing is while I
Speaker 4: was there, I asked every French person I met about
Speaker 4: the beasts, and all my responses in this unscientific survey
Speaker 4: fell into three categories. They didn't know anything about it
Speaker 4: at all, or or they thought it was a serial killer,
Speaker 4: or they thought it was a single unusual animal, probably
Speaker 4: something from another country. So it was really an interesting
Speaker 4: I mean that was the only three and there were
Speaker 4: a lot of people I talked to and it always
Speaker 4: fell into one of those three categories, and most people
Speaker 4: did know about it, and by far most people thought
Speaker 4: that this was all the work of a serial killer.
Speaker 1: I love that, So I thought that was it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I thought you might.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so typical. It is so typical.
Speaker 4: Which ties to that which is really fascinating in your
Speaker 4: book is you have you present this intersection here.
Speaker 5: You have these people with a poor local historical knowledge.
Speaker 4: They have their folklore or whatever, but they really don't
Speaker 4: have access to a quick way to look up what
Speaker 4: local you know, history is regarding deaths from animals, right,
Speaker 4: And then you've got this new technology of these quick
Speaker 4: fast newspapers coming out and mixing lore, and then you.
Speaker 5: Have this political pressures and social pressures and religious pressures.
Speaker 4: And you're just laying it all out there while why
Speaker 4: there is this.
Speaker 5: Amazing uh, I don't know. Next this might not be
Speaker 5: the right word, but there's this this everything's aligned. What
Speaker 5: do you call that scissor?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's true. That's the way
Speaker 1: I see it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And the and I think you make a really good
Speaker 4: case that this this would I think it would have
Speaker 4: happened sooner or later somewhere. This just happened to be
Speaker 4: the first place where you had these these these natural
Speaker 4: events happening with ignorant people who could just spread news
Speaker 4: really quickly, which is has an amazing parallels to what
Speaker 4: we see now in the monster world.
Speaker 5: As far as I'm concerned, I'm a skeptic.
Speaker 4: But we see this all the time with new claims
Speaker 4: where people find this the scantest of evidence and it
Speaker 4: goes wild on the internet, like the mon Talk monster
Speaker 4: for example. Just it's crazy, but it's just you do
Speaker 4: a brilliant job of laying it out there.
Speaker 1: So well, thank you.
Speaker 4: I'm going to keep saying you're brilliant. Okay, bear with
Speaker 4: me anyway, not really a question there, but I just
Speaker 4: wanted to say, you make a really excellent case for that.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 7: It does seem to me that the early and mid
Speaker 7: seventeen sixties were just incredibly ripe for this kind of
Speaker 7: event to occur. I mean, it was almost, as I
Speaker 7: suggested one of the early early chapters, it was almost
Speaker 7: as if if the beast had not exist, had not existed,
Speaker 7: or if the beast had not come along, you know,
Speaker 7: it would have had to be invented by someone, because
Speaker 7: it just it resonated in so many different keys and
Speaker 7: for so many different reasons that were bearing down on
Speaker 7: the culture.
Speaker 6: Well, let let me pick up on that, because I
Speaker 6: one of the things I enjoyed about the book was
Speaker 6: when you were when you were talking about the not
Speaker 6: only did you did geographical but also the political climate
Speaker 6: and the cultural climate, because I think, you know, for
Speaker 6: modern readers, you know, I mean, we can maybe go
Speaker 6: we can go see a film like, you know, a
Speaker 6: Brotherhood of the Wolf, or we can see some historical thing,
Speaker 6: and you know, we we sort of get a sense,
Speaker 6: you know, if the costume designer did his or her
Speaker 6: job right, then we have we have some sense.
Speaker 3: Of you know, what the people wore, what they ate.
Speaker 6: You know, you don't see people sling around cell phones.
Speaker 6: But it's it's hard for it's hard for I think
Speaker 6: a lot of modern folks to really get a good
Speaker 6: historical sense of the context in which these things, it's
Speaker 6: the you know, the beast and and other things emerged.
Speaker 6: So can you talk a litle bit about that and
Speaker 6: not only that, but also the geography. I mean, when
Speaker 6: I when I had when I was really doing some
Speaker 6: research on it, I had sort of pictured these I
Speaker 6: live in New Mexico, so I'm sort of in the desert,
Speaker 6: So I didn't really picture that part of France's desert. Really,
Speaker 6: I can't say that, but I didn't.
Speaker 3: I didn't.
Speaker 6: I sort of pictured meadows and fields. But in fact,
Speaker 6: as you point out, I mean a lot of it
Speaker 6: is really harsh terrain and which kind of which which
Speaker 6: really it's it's an element in the story that I
Speaker 6: hadn't expect.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yes, it's very harsh terrain. The Javaldon is part
Speaker 7: of this large land mass called the Massif Centraal, which
Speaker 7: is this a mountainous mass that just emerges from the
Speaker 7: soil in south central France and covers a very large expanse,
Speaker 7: and the Javaldon happens to be one of the more
Speaker 7: rugged regions. Even within that rugged region there there there
Speaker 7: are are granite outcroppings everywhere there there were I don't
Speaker 7: know if there still are, but there there were marshes
Speaker 7: and bogs around every corner, very dense forests, impassable forests,
Speaker 7: streams and rivers running underground.
Speaker 1: It was a very.
Speaker 7: Very difficult, unpredictable terrain, and this one would think was
Speaker 7: one of the reasons that the wolves were able to
Speaker 7: rain over the territory more or less unchallenged for a
Speaker 7: period of years. It was also it was a sparsely
Speaker 7: populated region. For that because of the geographical or geological features,
Speaker 7: it was sparsely populated. It was not an area well
Speaker 7: suited to agriculture, so it couldn't sustain a large population.
Speaker 3: And as they are called, pretty brutal winters.
Speaker 7: Very yeah, that's right, brutal winters, fickle weather, fog, rain
Speaker 7: and snow that would last it into May and June.
Speaker 7: It's a very difficult terrain. And if you want to
Speaker 7: know why it took expert hunters fourteen months to bag
Speaker 7: a large wolf and the Javaldon, this is reason number one.
Speaker 7: It was just an incredibly difficult terrain, and terrain that
Speaker 7: none of them were familiar with. None of them because
Speaker 7: they were all Parisians, and to the extent that they
Speaker 7: had hunting experience. It was in the plains of northern
Speaker 7: France for the most part, so they were not expecting
Speaker 7: what they found when they arrived in the Shaveld. Most
Speaker 7: of them had never been there. Nobody visited, nobody visited
Speaker 7: the je hotel.
Speaker 3: There was nothing to see there, right.
Speaker 7: There's nothing to see, and so they went off with
Speaker 7: delusions for grandeur and were shocked to find this often impassable,
Speaker 7: very difficult terrain when they got there. So no wonder
Speaker 7: it took so long.
Speaker 4: So so you have this this general accepted knowledge that
Speaker 4: there is a single wild beast attacking people and killing them,
Speaker 4: and villagers are being conscripted, hired to beat the woods
Speaker 4: and and go around and look, and and then.
Speaker 5: What are they looking for?
Speaker 4: What are the It seems like the thing that they're
Speaker 4: being they're chasing is well, you tell it. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's it's a lot of different things they're being told.
Speaker 4: But what are what are people describing?
Speaker 7: You know, virtually all I guess, probably probably all of
Speaker 7: the hunts that were carried out under the direction of
Speaker 7: these the sequence of hunters, the dragoon Captain Duamel, the
Speaker 7: Norman aristocrat Donoval, and then the gun bearer Petrone, all
Speaker 7: of these hunts were carried out as wolf hunts. I
Speaker 7: mean they used the techniques that they would have used
Speaker 7: if they were hunting wolves in the forests of Fontainebleau
Speaker 7: in northern France. And of course the peasants of the
Speaker 7: south and the nobles, the noblemen of the South also
Speaker 7: had a certain amount of experience and rooting out wolves
Speaker 7: from their forests, and so they were using those standard
Speaker 7: techniques of beating the bushes, placing people around the perimeter
Speaker 7: of the forest with guns. Though here's reason number two
Speaker 7: why it took so long to kill a large wolf
Speaker 7: down there. The peasants didn't have guns because they weren't
Speaker 7: allowed how to have them. They did their hunting with
Speaker 7: pitchforks and spades. But the peasants would beat the bushes,
Speaker 7: and the noblemen mounted on horse and armed with muskets
Speaker 7: would be arrayed around the perimeter, and sometimes something would
Speaker 7: emerge from the depths of the forest, and sometimes not.
Speaker 7: But in almost all of the cases where something did
Speaker 7: emerge and there was an encounter, well in most cases
Speaker 7: when there was an encounter between these hunters and a
Speaker 7: creature emerging from the woods, the people there on the
Speaker 7: ground described the creature in outlandish ways. They said, among
Speaker 7: other things, that it had blazing red eyes, that it
Speaker 7: sometimes walked on its hind legs, that it had the
Speaker 7: ability to jump over high walls in a single bound,
Speaker 7: more or less like Superman, That its hide could repel
Speaker 7: lead shot, that it could cover immense distances in a
Speaker 7: single day or in a matter of hours.
Speaker 4: Were people sorry, Were people actually alleging that it was
Speaker 4: a werewolf?
Speaker 7: Almost certainly, some of the peasants were alleging that it
Speaker 7: was a werewolf, though in the official documents that were
Speaker 7: recorded about these various sightings, at least I did not
Speaker 7: detect a single werewolf mentioned. So the sub delegates and
Speaker 7: the cures who drafted the documents and wrote the letters
Speaker 7: to officials in high places did not allow edge that
Speaker 7: the peasants were talking about were wolves. But it almost
Speaker 7: certainly they were, because some of the werewolf reports did
Speaker 7: make it into newspapers, and the rumors of where wolves
Speaker 7: did percolate up to the published literature.
Speaker 5: And in France they called them loop garu.
Speaker 4: Right, that's right, So that you don't they don't use
Speaker 4: their n's, are their p's, is what you're telling about?
Speaker 7: Usually the final consonants aren't pronounced.
Speaker 4: Is that kind of wastefulness that is causing so much
Speaker 4: problems today?
Speaker 5: Anyway?
Speaker 3: Not us?
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 5: So what does that actually translate to?
Speaker 1: Well, Louis Louis wolf garu.
Speaker 7: That's you know, that's something I've never really looked into.
Speaker 7: I don't know exactly. I don't know what the literal
Speaker 7: translation of garu would be.
Speaker 6: Well, it's just like I said, I'm buffy.
Speaker 4: Well, it's interesting because this story as I understand it.
Speaker 5: Specifically, we'll get to that. I mengined.
Speaker 4: But Kurt mac sciattiod Mac, I think, is how you
Speaker 4: pronounce his name, The guy who wrote the original Wolfman
Speaker 4: movie for Universal, He, at least in lore, is supposed
Speaker 4: to have pulled the idea that silver will kill a
Speaker 4: werewolf from this tale, specifically because of the silver bullet
Speaker 4: story being involved with bringing down the beast the second time. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so the story, whether they thought it was a were
Speaker 4: wolf or not, it apparently has a really important impact
Speaker 4: on modern werewolf lore, most of which is made.
Speaker 7: Up, right, right, I love it. I love it because
Speaker 7: it's such a fiction. It's a twentieth century invention, this
Speaker 7: story that a silver bullet brought down the second wolf
Speaker 7: in June of seventeen sixty seven. There's no documentary evidence
Speaker 7: that silver was used, and no one discussed silver having
Speaker 7: been used in seventeen sixty seven.
Speaker 3: What is that story to go? And you have left
Speaker 3: that out for us?
Speaker 7: Well, I think it's immediate the later the Massager edition.
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, either that, but I mean I was specifically
Speaker 6: the silver bullet in John Sistelle, Right, I.
Speaker 7: Think it's almost certain that the silver bullet myth appeared
Speaker 7: in some fictionalized or semi fictionalized account of the Beast.
Speaker 7: In the twentieth century, there was a kind of there
Speaker 7: was an upsurge an interest in the Beast story from
Speaker 7: the eighteen eighties and nineties on into the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 7: and many things were written about the Beast in that
Speaker 7: thirty or forty year period, much of it fictitious in
Speaker 7: one way or another, And there were also novels written
Speaker 7: about the Beast. And I confess that I have not
Speaker 7: been able to find the first instance when this this
Speaker 7: myth is introduced into the the to the Beast lore,
Speaker 7: but I'm quite sure that it happened in the early
Speaker 7: twentieth century or late nineteenth Well.
Speaker 4: I was going to say, if it didn't predate the
Speaker 4: wolf Men movie, that would be very interesting. So if
Speaker 4: we can't find anything earlier than that, because again, the
Speaker 4: common legend in movie buff lore is that that Kurt.
Speaker 5: Mack I think that's how it's pronounced. I might be
Speaker 5: totally messing that.
Speaker 4: If I am apologized to our listeners, this is this
Speaker 4: episode is rife.
Speaker 5: With me and having pronunciation problems.
Speaker 4: If that's not true, it could be that you know
Speaker 4: that it's the other way around, that his silver bullet
Speaker 4: influenced all of the world literature.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it. Yeah, so I think it's I think
Speaker 1: it's good.
Speaker 7: I think it's certainly plausible that he did pull it
Speaker 7: from the beast lore that was circulating at the time,
Speaker 7: in the early part of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: I think it's very, very plausible.
Speaker 7: But he didn't he didn't get it from seventeen sixty
Speaker 7: seven because it didn't happen.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: You know, Google has in their Google Books some really
Speaker 4: good online tools for searching for phrases. So I'm not
Speaker 4: sure what the French phrase for silverbull it would be,
Speaker 4: but maybe we could look that up and see if
Speaker 4: we can find it in print, because really, yeah, that's
Speaker 4: a fascinating little things to add on to your research.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So, right, Well, I was serious about the nature of
Speaker 3: the deaths.
Speaker 6: I mean, you've got these these these killings that apparently
Speaker 6: can be attributable to anything from a serial killer to
Speaker 6: a wolf to an extra not extra trustrial, but certainly
Speaker 6: a demonic entity.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 6: What was unusual about these deaths just in terms of
Speaker 6: the way that they were, the way they occurred, or
Speaker 6: the way they were found.
Speaker 7: Well, they were, I mean, technically they were not unusual.
Speaker 7: If they had been compared to other wolf killings in
Speaker 7: other regions and other times, it would have looked perfectly normal.
Speaker 7: But they were What did people think was Yeah, they
Speaker 7: were certainly ghastly. They were certainly ghastly. And there was
Speaker 7: much talk about the decapitations, and there were a lot
Speaker 7: of them. At least a couple of dozen of the
Speaker 7: victims had their heads removed, and there were other, you know,
Speaker 7: odd features at least in some of the killings that
Speaker 7: that made some wonder about diabolical influences or or other
Speaker 7: sorts of evil intentions that would not have been characteristic
Speaker 7: of wild animals. For example, almost all of the bodies
Speaker 7: that were recovered and that were described with any detail
Speaker 7: were savaged only from the waist up, and the chest
Speaker 7: cavity was torn open, and the liver and kidney and
Speaker 7: heart were eaten, and often the blood from the chest
Speaker 7: cavity was removed, or so it seemed anyway, at the
Speaker 7: same time that the head was nowhere to be found.
Speaker 7: So you can understand why that would be a ghastly
Speaker 7: shocking sight. And when it happened repeatedly, it was easy
Speaker 7: to imagine that there were supernatural or diabolical forces at work.
Speaker 3: And so there was part of a vampireic element to
Speaker 3: it the bo.
Speaker 7: That's an interesting question, you know, because vampire and interest
Speaker 7: in vampires also emerged out of eighteenth century literature, But
Speaker 7: vampires were not mentioned as far as I know in
Speaker 7: the Java dal On seventeen sixty four, seven sixty five,
Speaker 7: and there's no evidence of mentions of vampires in the documents.
Speaker 3: But those I talked about blood laws.
Speaker 7: But yes, right, or at least the gore, the gore
Speaker 7: of the blood and where and where the fact that
Speaker 7: the beast evidently liked to lick blood and would lick
Speaker 7: the blood down to the down to the ground, and
Speaker 7: would remove the blood from this or that part of
Speaker 7: the torso that had been shredded. So, yes, that the
Speaker 7: beast was often described as having some lurid or strange
Speaker 7: fascination or attraction to blood. Yeah, but vampires I have
Speaker 7: not seen them. They have not popped up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So that actually ties in to some of our questions,
Speaker 4: which like, did most people think it was a normal
Speaker 4: animal or a supernatural animal? And how did that tie
Speaker 4: into the Church's response.
Speaker 7: I wouldn't even want to venture a guess about you know,
Speaker 7: what percentage of the locals believed that it was a wolf,
Speaker 7: and what percentage believed it was a witch and so on. Certainly,
Speaker 7: many people believed there were diabolical forces at work, but
Speaker 7: many people also believed it was a wolf. And you know,
Speaker 7: both stories were current and others as well. But I
Speaker 7: don't think there's any question that the Church contributed to.
Speaker 1: The kind of.
Speaker 7: Magical hysteria that the countryside in late winter and early
Speaker 7: spring of seventeen sixty five, because the Bishop of Mande,
Speaker 7: in a public proclamation that he published on December thirty first,
Speaker 7: seventeen sixty four, called the beast the scourge of God,
Speaker 7: described it as having powers that were special powers that
Speaker 7: were given to the beast by God so that it
Speaker 7: could act as a tool of divine vengeance. Now he
Speaker 7: didn't call it a witch, call it a werewolf. He
Speaker 7: didn't call it a supernatural being exactly, but he did
Speaker 7: say that it was working with divine magic, and that
Speaker 7: it was no wonder that it was that it was
Speaker 7: avoiding the huntsman in these organized hunting parties, that it
Speaker 7: was able to make it safe self, invisible, in essence,
Speaker 7: no wonder it had got on its side, And so
Speaker 7: that made the local peasants and many of the cures
Speaker 7: no doubt believe that there was a form of magic
Speaker 7: working over the land in seventeen sixty four and seventeen
Speaker 7: sixty five, and so those source of beliefs merged easily
Speaker 7: into other less orthodox superstitions.
Speaker 6: Interesting, so there's a definitely element of atoning for sins.
Speaker 6: And that was one of the things that struck me
Speaker 6: was the I've always been interested in the social role
Speaker 6: of monsters, and you know, oftentimes monsters will be you know,
Speaker 6: the boogeyman. You know, don't do this because bad things
Speaker 6: will happen to you, and you know, don't go in
Speaker 6: the lake because the lake monster will get you.
Speaker 3: That sort of thing.
Speaker 6: And I saw exactly the same sort of thing in
Speaker 6: your book. Is just sort of seeing the social control.
Speaker 3: Aspects of it. It was just it was just fascinating,
Speaker 3: that's true.
Speaker 7: Let me say it's a striking it is a striking document.
Speaker 7: The Bishop of momes mong the mall. It's called the
Speaker 7: official announcement or a circular. It's just it's an amazing
Speaker 7: document because yes, and in essence, he's saying, Uh, if
Speaker 7: you don't want to have to contend with monsters, you
Speaker 7: better start doing your religious duties and raise your children right.
Speaker 7: And it raised them to be humble and devout and
Speaker 7: raised them to care for the poor, and then you'll
Speaker 7: have no worries. Otherwise, look out for the monsters.
Speaker 3: It'll be good. We was going to fallo up.
Speaker 6: One of the most popular theories, as you know, as
Speaker 6: you talk about, is that it's a hyaena. I think
Speaker 6: Joe and Nickel in his recent book Tracking the Man
Speaker 6: be suggested that the beast was a hyena. What do
Speaker 6: you think of that explanation?
Speaker 4: Well, actually, I just quickly been Joe's actually backed away
Speaker 4: from that, and specifically, in a conversation I had with him,
Speaker 4: he talked about Jay's book as being a one of
Speaker 4: the reasons he's endorsing the wolf hypothesis.
Speaker 3: Very good.
Speaker 1: Well, that's good to hear.
Speaker 6: You're already influencing the scholarship. Well done.
Speaker 7: It's nice to hear, because the hyena hypothesis is I mean,
Speaker 7: it's fascinating why it has had such a stronghold on
Speaker 7: the imagination for two centuries. But there just isn't any evidence.
Speaker 7: There just isn't good evidence for it. But it caught
Speaker 7: on very early, thanks in large part, I believe, to
Speaker 7: the popularity of the Comte de Boufont and his natural
Speaker 7: history in the late seventeen fifties and early seventeen sixties,
Speaker 7: and he had described the Hyaena in a very fantastical way,
Speaker 7: And also because there had been this other text written
Speaker 7: in the mid seventeen fifties called a Dissiccation on the Hyaena,
Speaker 7: drawn from ancient sources and other more recent sources, that
Speaker 7: also described the hyaenas having these weird, otherworldly abilities. And
Speaker 7: I think it was just in the culture, this propensity
Speaker 7: to fear the hyaena and to believe that hyenas were
Speaker 7: capable of supernatural, extraordinary things. And so when the first
Speaker 7: first couple of people described this beast as having Hyaena
Speaker 7: like features hyena like qualities, it caught on immediately, and
Speaker 7: throughout seventeen sixty five it remained one of the most
Speaker 7: popular theories of the beast's identity, even though the experienced
Speaker 7: huntsman on the ground in the province throughout the late
Speaker 7: spring and summer of seventeen sixty five discounted the theory.
Speaker 7: They didn't take it seriously.
Speaker 1: At all.
Speaker 7: Until until September of seventeen sixty five, when Francois Antoine,
Speaker 7: after killing his large wolf in order to make it
Speaker 7: seem like an extraordinary event, allowed others to describe that
Speaker 7: wolf as having hyena like features and that I'm.
Speaker 4: Sorry, sorry, So would you say the hyena hypothesis is laughable?
Speaker 5: I just wanted to do.
Speaker 3: Blake and his puns.
Speaker 1: I have to say it. It is pretty laughable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is.
Speaker 7: I know that there was a TV a documentary on
Speaker 7: the Beast a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: I don't know, something like Animal Planet.
Speaker 5: Yes there was, Yes, there was, and the History Channel.
Speaker 7: But yeah, okay, yes, that's right. It was the History Channel.
Speaker 7: And and those two salutes also decided that it was
Speaker 7: a hyena.
Speaker 5: They sure did, they sure?
Speaker 3: Blake.
Speaker 6: Actually, Blake and I watched that together, and we were
Speaker 6: we were doing our best to.
Speaker 5: Mimics, is what we were doing.
Speaker 1: It was an interesting, entertaining show.
Speaker 4: But they were where they went in the cave. I
Speaker 4: thought that was nice, and this beautiful scenery.
Speaker 7: Yeah right right, no, I but they were basing their
Speaker 7: conjectures on inventions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rather
Speaker 7: rather than from rather than on the documentary evidence at
Speaker 7: the time.
Speaker 1: But that's that's neither here and there.
Speaker 6: Well, and let me let me just fall up on
Speaker 6: that real quick, because that's that's one thing that that
Speaker 6: we see in doing this research is the the importance
Speaker 6: and value of going back to original research, you know,
Speaker 6: going back and going to the first references to those things,
Speaker 6: and not just accepting other people's paraphrasing. And I mean
Speaker 6: over and over and over again. I see this in
Speaker 6: my research in Blake as well and others where you know,
Speaker 6: the the to my mind, one of the main faults
Speaker 6: and one of the main reasons why so many of
Speaker 6: these these mysteries, including cryptozoological ones and you know, strange
Speaker 6: animal ones, is that the reason these things don't get
Speaker 6: solved and there's no progress made on this because they
Speaker 6: simply don't do good scholarship. And maybe they don't maybe
Speaker 6: they don't come from an academic background so they're not
Speaker 6: used to that. But that that, I think is one
Speaker 6: of the strongest points of your work, and certainly the
Speaker 6: book is you do bring very rigorous scholarship and it
Speaker 6: and it really shows and so that's that was well done.
Speaker 7: Thanks, yeah, well with regard to the Hyaena in particular.
Speaker 7: You know, what happened was that the story of the
Speaker 7: beast got renewed for various reasons, so we could talk
Speaker 7: about it if you want to, but we don't have
Speaker 7: to in the late nineteenth century, basically because of a
Speaker 7: new interest in French folklore and folk.
Speaker 1: Tales, and.
Speaker 7: So the story was excavated in a sense, and all
Speaker 7: of the original journalistic commentary that surrounded the Hunt for
Speaker 7: the Beast was just entered into the documentary record and
Speaker 7: accepted uncritically, even though it was of course separated from
Speaker 7: the original context by over a century, and many people
Speaker 7: had in the meantime discounted and discredited much of that
Speaker 7: journalistic commentary. It gained new life as the story of
Speaker 7: the Beast itself gained new life in the late nineteenth century,
Speaker 7: and so this hymena hypothesis lived on well throughout the
Speaker 7: twentieth century into our own day because of this uncritical
Speaker 7: updence of documents that were excavated a century after the
Speaker 7: event just never read with serious attention.
Speaker 4: One of the things I had been thinking about in
Speaker 4: my own research was would it be possible to do
Speaker 4: an exhimation of any of the victims and see if
Speaker 4: there was evidence of a particular animal being involved in
Speaker 4: the attacks. And I'm not sure how that would be
Speaker 4: culturally received over there, but I think after reading your book,
Speaker 4: I don't think it's necessary. Just by I think the
Speaker 4: sheer weight of the evidence in a little bit of
Speaker 4: Okham's Razor action, you make a really really good case
Speaker 4: that it was wolves, and that the reason that seems
Speaker 4: so outrageous now has more to do with the fact
Speaker 4: that wolves have this reputation as being misunderstood and essentially harmless.
Speaker 7: But I was just going to suggest that when you
Speaker 7: do the second part of this two part investigation, that
Speaker 7: you consider asking your guest.
Speaker 1: Whether he and.
Speaker 7: His colleagues in the field except that animals have histories too,
Speaker 7: and animal species have histories and are embedded in historical
Speaker 7: circumstances just as humans are. Because I think that's something
Speaker 7: that's easily overlooked by biologists or by zoologists, that they
Speaker 7: instinctively assume, at least this is an assumption that I have,
Speaker 7: that they instinctively assume that animals ranging over a very
Speaker 7: different territory three or five or two hundred years ago
Speaker 7: would have behaved just as they do today, as they
Speaker 7: are observed in our world, whereas I just don't think
Speaker 7: that's I don't think that's likely.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, the way I had approached it was
Speaker 4: my hypothesis is without having actually had that second interview,
Speaker 4: that there are going to be conditions which will drive
Speaker 4: a wolf, for a pack of wolves to become man killers,
Speaker 4: and that if we look at the historical context of
Speaker 4: these killings in France, we'll find that very similar conditions
Speaker 4: to those that we would expect will actually have been occurring.
Speaker 4: And I'm not an expert, so I don't want to
Speaker 4: wildly speculate. I think there's been plenty of speculation on
Speaker 4: this thing already.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's for sure. That's for sure.
Speaker 7: Nor am I I know zoologists either, so I should
Speaker 7: just shut my truck.
Speaker 5: I'm just saying I.
Speaker 4: Have a ton of questions for him, but I am
Speaker 4: really interested to find out if that hypothesis is correct.
Speaker 4: And you're right, I think it matters not only what
Speaker 4: the general behavior of animals are, uh, you know, as
Speaker 4: a as a whole, but what that particular pack has
Speaker 4: been through and war impacts everything. Yeah, right, And the
Speaker 4: things that were happening in France. We haven't even mentioned it,
Speaker 4: but a lot of your book is about how the
Speaker 4: French and Indian War devastated France, not just in the
Speaker 4: sense that people were dying on battlefields, but also economically and.
Speaker 5: Culturally, just had a huge impact.
Speaker 4: So that would have impacted the livestock, and it would
Speaker 4: have impacted the people who raised it and the animals
Speaker 4: that predated.
Speaker 5: I think all of the rights are going to come
Speaker 5: to play.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 6: Well, let me ask you about the different treatments. As
Speaker 6: you know, and as you talk about some in the book,
Speaker 6: yours is only the the the latest and best discussion
Speaker 6: of of the Beasts of Javidant, but there's been, you know,
Speaker 6: countless other ones, everything from poems to to other books
Speaker 6: and other you know, discussions and whatever else. So what obviously,
Speaker 6: you know, a big part of what you bring to
Speaker 6: it is, as I mentioned before, a good scholarship, and
Speaker 6: of course the perspective of time. But what are what
Speaker 6: are what were some of the earlier accounts of this
Speaker 6: and other earlier other writers and researchers explanations for them?
Speaker 6: I just maybe if you want to highlight two or
Speaker 6: three writers and what they thought.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Yeah, there's a lot has been written on the
Speaker 7: Beast of the CID, that's for sure, especially in France.
Speaker 7: Very little in English, but a lot in French. And
Speaker 7: though very little of it, I have to say, was
Speaker 7: very historically informed, a lot of it's entertaining. I mean,
Speaker 7: many of these people, even if they didn't didn't take
Speaker 7: the time to learn about France in seventeen sixty five,
Speaker 7: I did bother to go to the archives and look
Speaker 7: at at least some of the archival documents, and and
Speaker 7: and they studied the narrative of events, and they got
Speaker 7: acquainted with some of the victims and their families, and
Speaker 7: they know things about them and their and their villages
Speaker 7: that you know, the casual student wouldn't have bothered to learn.
Speaker 7: So they're they're often quite entertaining to read, but they're
Speaker 7: usually very narrow and in their scope and their conceptualization
Speaker 7: and in the kind of argument that they present. Almost
Speaker 7: always the authors of these texts are are pushing some
Speaker 7: theory about the Beast's identity. One of the most influential
Speaker 7: We've already alluded to this theory, the theory of the
Speaker 7: serial killer.
Speaker 1: This this.
Speaker 7: Theory emerged again in the early twenty century. I think tellingly,
Speaker 7: given that this is a time when news of Jack
Speaker 7: the Ripper was the was in the air, and the
Speaker 7: French were dealing with their first experiences with serial killers.
Speaker 7: But there was a doctor in Montpellier who wrote a
Speaker 7: very influential article in nineteen eleven suggesting that the visage
Speaker 7: Valdal had been a human, a human serial killer, a
Speaker 7: psychotic who was perhaps something of a sexual pervert or something.
Speaker 7: And not only not only was the Chevaldon afflicted by
Speaker 7: this phenomenon, but he inspired copycat criminals elsewhere in the
Speaker 7: realm in the seventeen sixties, and this just this proved
Speaker 7: to be an extremely influential hypothesis that has been picked
Speaker 7: up in countless texts ever since. And obviously it has
Speaker 7: made its influence. It's had made its impact on French
Speaker 7: citizens who work in Disneyland. Clearly, it's just you know,
Speaker 7: it's one of the favorite hypotheses, and it is one
Speaker 7: of the hypotheses that informed Brotherhood of the Wolf, the
Speaker 7: entertaining film that came out about ten years ago. Other
Speaker 7: hypotheses involved hybrid animals. The dog wolf hybrid is trained
Speaker 7: by some sick local nobleman is a favorite hypothesis by many,
Speaker 7: and the wolf hypothesis is also favored by a number
Speaker 7: of serious students of the story the Beast of the
Speaker 7: javal Dhal, and a number of books have been written
Speaker 7: over the years arguing that the beast could only be
Speaker 7: a wolf, but arguing in a way that was focused
Speaker 7: eclusively on evidence from the killings and not the larger
Speaker 7: cultural landscape.
Speaker 6: Well, it sounds like a lot of most of the
Speaker 6: previous people had had basically begun with the conclusion and
Speaker 6: work backwards looking for evidence for it, instead of doing
Speaker 6: it the more scientific way, which is following the evidence
Speaker 6: to whatever conclusion it goes to.
Speaker 7: Right, I think that was often the case. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 7: And it's also the story is also it lives on
Speaker 7: because it is associated with or identified with the culture
Speaker 7: of the Javadon, and it's kind of, i don't know,
Speaker 7: like it's similar to stories about the New Jersey devil
Speaker 7: or logo, you know, you know, and mythical or semi
Speaker 7: mythical animals that are associated with the region and the
Speaker 7: and the culture of the region. And so there are
Speaker 7: locals who keep telling the story just because they're enamored
Speaker 7: of the story and of the celebrity that it has
Speaker 7: brought the region.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we had an opportunity to talk to a paleontologist
Speaker 4: about the dire wolf hypothesis, and he thought it was
Speaker 4: pretty laughable, not because not just not because of the
Speaker 4: the unlikeliness that a dire wolf would still be alive,
Speaker 4: but just because it would not There's no particular reason
Speaker 4: why a dire wolf attack would be.
Speaker 5: Eating worse than a regular wolf attack.
Speaker 4: You know, It's just that they weren't that much bigger
Speaker 4: than regular wolves, I guess was the idea. But if
Speaker 4: it was wolves, and I think you make again an
Speaker 4: extremely compelling case that it was two things were there.
Speaker 4: Do you know if there's any documentary evidence besides the
Speaker 4: fact that all these bodies were piling up of an
Speaker 4: increasing wolf attacks and when the attack stopped, do you
Speaker 4: think what do you what do you attribute too?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean I think it's I think it's pretty
Speaker 7: easy to explain, actually, to tell you the truth. Well,
Speaker 7: to answer your first question, yeah, there is plenty of
Speaker 7: circumstantial evidence that wolf attacks were on the rise in
Speaker 7: France really from the mid seventeenth century through the mid
Speaker 7: eighteenth century. This was a particularly bloody period in French history,
Speaker 7: lots of lupine predation, and there's much evidence for it.
Speaker 7: There's a great book I probably should have mentioned this
Speaker 7: earlier that I discussed in The Monster's Book that was
Speaker 7: published in two thousand and seven by a French scholar,
Speaker 7: a rural historian, who went to the trouble of cataloging
Speaker 7: all of the wolfly violence inflicted on humans between about
Speaker 7: fifteen hundred and nineteen hundred. It's exhaustively researched and it
Speaker 7: shows beyond a sh out of a doubt that the
Speaker 7: wolves were inflicting a lot of damage between about sixteen
Speaker 7: fifteen and seventeen fifty, and it slows down significantly in
Speaker 7: the late eighteenth century. I think largely because the state
Speaker 7: put in place an effective and well coordinated program of
Speaker 7: wolf hunting. In the Revolutionary decade seventeen nineties, there is
Speaker 7: evidence that at documentary evidence, that wolf hunters are killing
Speaker 7: thousands of wolves per year on French territory. There are
Speaker 7: some other episodes in the early nineteenth century, and even
Speaker 7: in the late nineteenth century there are a few random
Speaker 7: scattered attacks, but I think it's the progress of modernity
Speaker 7: of clearing for railroads and modern agriculture, and the spread
Speaker 7: of urban centers and the diminishing of a wolf habitats
Speaker 7: that ultimately brings an end to the entire phenomenon by.
Speaker 1: About nineteen hundred.
Speaker 7: There have been in the course of the twentieth century
Speaker 7: a few attacks here and there on livestock, but I
Speaker 7: don't believe there have been human fatalities in the twentieth century,
Speaker 7: or there were in the twentieth century and none in
Speaker 7: the twenty first. So wolf attacks have indeed been focused
Speaker 7: on sheep and cattle since about nineteen hundred, and I
Speaker 7: think that is almost undoubtedly associated with modernity itself. French
Speaker 7: people live in a different world in nineteen hundred than
Speaker 7: they had in seventeen fifty, much more urban, much more urban,
Speaker 7: a much more mechanized economy, fewer forests, and fewer wolves
Speaker 7: because they had been largely eliminated thanks to the state
Speaker 7: program that took over in the seventeen eighties and nineties.
Speaker 6: So in a way it was it was actually it
Speaker 6: was actually a very effective I mean, if if you're
Speaker 6: trying to eliminate the beast, then kill kill all the wolves,
Speaker 6: and actually you do a good job.
Speaker 3: That's exactly what you need to.
Speaker 1: Do, right, that's the thing to do, Just.
Speaker 3: Kill everything and hope that the beast is among them.
Speaker 6: Well, I just have to say, you know, when reading
Speaker 6: reading the book, I was struck by the parallels to
Speaker 6: the research, the Chepicaple research I'd done. And in both
Speaker 6: cases you had ordinary predation. In the case the Chepicaba,
Speaker 6: of course you have livestock predation. In the case of
Speaker 6: the beast, you have a predation on humans. It was
Speaker 6: spectacularly misinterpreted, I mean just just amazingly and job droppingly misinterpreted,
Speaker 6: but in really culturally fascinating ways. And I just wouldn't
Speaker 6: want to touch on the ways in which the story
Speaker 6: of the beast got exaggerated over time. It's you know,
Speaker 6: its size, its abilities, and the way that was fueled
Speaker 6: by an eager media, and the ways in which the
Speaker 6: beast was a product of the media and the press.
Speaker 3: Can you talk all about that?
Speaker 1: Sure? Yeah.
Speaker 7: The mid eighteenth century was a time when journalism just
Speaker 7: exploded in France and throughout Europe. It became the more
Speaker 7: or less modern enterprise that we recognized today. And it
Speaker 7: was in this period mid mid to late eighteenth century,
Speaker 7: and there was one very skilled journalist in particular who
Speaker 7: worked for a paper in Avignon called the Cree d Avignon,
Speaker 7: who saw the news value and the marketability of this story,
Speaker 7: and who began flogging it very early on by November
Speaker 7: and December seventeen sixty four, and he became really the
Speaker 7: prime conveyor of news about the beast, not only to
Speaker 7: readers of newspapers all over France, but to other newspaper
Speaker 7: editors who sometimes simply plagiarized his stories or copied large
Speaker 7: chunks of them, or repackaged them and offered new kinds
Speaker 7: of descriptions of the same events. And the image of
Speaker 7: the beast understandably, almost necessarily continued to grow over the
Speaker 7: course of seventeen sixty five, simply because of its persistence,
Speaker 7: the fact that skilled huntsmen were unable to defeat it
Speaker 7: and were unable to root it out. It even killed
Speaker 7: young shepherdesses under their noses well while they were hunting
Speaker 7: for it. So it's naturally acquired greater and greater, more
Speaker 7: stupendous characteristics with each new report, especially from about January
Speaker 7: seventeen sixty five on, and it's the spectacular sensational nature
Speaker 7: of that recording that helps to turn I believe, helps
Speaker 7: to turn public opinion against the mythological, the more mythological
Speaker 7: representations of the beast. In the summer of seventeen sixty five,
Speaker 7: that is, the Courier Davignan and other papers like it
Speaker 7: had taken the exaggerations so far that impartial readers could
Speaker 7: see the could see the exaggeration at work, and began
Speaker 7: to cast a more skeptical eye on the stories and
Speaker 7: on the whole phenomenon. So you do see evidence here
Speaker 7: and there in the documents from about i'd say in
Speaker 7: July seventeen sixty five on that the public is beginning
Speaker 7: to lose interest and beginning to lose faith in the
Speaker 7: sensational character of this monster.
Speaker 4: Interesting, we were out of time, unfortunately. I just again
Speaker 4: I want to say, any of our listeners who are
Speaker 4: interested in having a thorough and complete monster library, when
Speaker 4: they need this book. If you like French history, you
Speaker 4: need this book. And if you just really want to
Speaker 4: know what was going on in France when this monster
Speaker 4: was well, okay, when these wolves were killing people. I
Speaker 4: think this a pretty monstrous Yeah, yeah, I mean, certainly
Speaker 4: their activities were monstrous if you happen to be the prey.
Speaker 4: I think Monsters of the Jevadan as an excellent addition
Speaker 4: to any bookshelf. So that being said, thank you're welcome.
Speaker 4: That being said, we'd like to ask our guests this
Speaker 4: same question.
Speaker 5: What is yours her favorite monster?
Speaker 1: Uh? Well, you won't be surprised the werewolf?
Speaker 7: What? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've always loved where.
Speaker 7: I love the original Werewolf wolf Man uh movie Blon Cheney,
Speaker 7: and I've I've loved virtually everyone ever since, even though
Speaker 7: not very good Benicia del Toro movie from a year
Speaker 7: or two ago.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed that.
Speaker 4: I enjoyed that when I thought, honestly, it wasn't his fault,
Speaker 4: it was.
Speaker 5: Hopkins phoned it in to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and yeah, I agree.
Speaker 4: It's just like if he had he can do better,
Speaker 4: and he's done better. And I don't know why he
Speaker 4: went with that sort of over the top hannibal lecture
Speaker 4: type character.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just not sure a little.
Speaker 4: Weird because it was easy, but yeah, it was he
Speaker 4: phoned it in exactly.
Speaker 5: But if I think if he hadn't, the rest of
Speaker 5: the movie I thought really worked well.
Speaker 3: I thought.
Speaker 4: So Del Toro and Emily Blunt did a great job,
Speaker 4: and Sir.
Speaker 5: Anthony but let me down anyway.
Speaker 1: But I'm with you.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for spending so much time with
Speaker 5: us today.
Speaker 1: Oh you're welcome, Mornstertle.
Speaker 5: Thanks for listening to another episode of Monster Talk. Today.
Speaker 4: We talked about killer wolves and the Beasts of ja
Speaker 4: Valdan with historian and author Jay Smith. A link to
Speaker 4: his book is in the show notes. In the interview,
Speaker 4: we talked briefly about the French werewolf legend of the
Speaker 4: loop Garu. Loop is French for wolf, but we were
Speaker 4: unclear about the meaning of the word garu. After we talked,
Speaker 4: Jay wrote back and sent us the definition. It is
Speaker 4: as follows, a mythic malevolent or evil doing figure, generally
Speaker 4: with characteristics of a man and a wolf thought to
Speaker 4: wonder the countryside. Variations of luke Garou legend followed over
Speaker 4: from France to Louisiana, where the melting pot of American
Speaker 4: folklore produced the rue Garou, which can be a werewolf
Speaker 4: or a variant of the boogeyman. Speaking of Louisiana, if
Speaker 4: you're going to be near the Big Easy in October,
Speaker 4: you should come to the Center for Skeptical Inquiries first
Speaker 4: annual CSICon or icon, which will be in New Orleans
Speaker 4: October twenty seventh through the thirtieth. The hosts of Monster
Speaker 4: Talk will all be there, including me, Blake Smith, Ben Radford,
Speaker 4: and doctor Karen Stolsnow go to csiconference dot org for details.
Speaker 5: Monster Talk is.
Speaker 4: Produced with the assistance of Skeptic Magazine, and we thank them.
Speaker 4: We're also thankful for the support of listeners like David
Speaker 4: Rodriguez and Robert Smith, who used our donate button at
Speaker 4: monster talk dot org and gave generously. If you'd like
Speaker 4: a copy of Jay's book or any of the music
Speaker 4: from today's show again and please check the show notes
Speaker 4: at monster talk dot org. We'll have links to all
Speaker 4: those things, plus more information about today's topic. A brief
Speaker 4: excerpt from Henry Hall's version of Who's Afraid of the
Speaker 4: Big Bed Wolf opened the show, and then we heard
Speaker 4: from electronic artist Symbian Project, who has been kind enough
Speaker 4: to give us permission to use his music in the
Speaker 4: making of our show. You should check out his work
Speaker 4: on iTunes or Amazon dot com. Monster Talks theme music
Speaker 4: is by Peach Stealing Monkeys. Thanks again for listening.
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