#in any case... crying at the specification that This Once you're a westerner

[todayisafridaynight]

#ANYWAY LET ME COOK. im not a good chef but i can at least cook an egg lemme see what i got...

This is leagues ahead of Jo as per Substitute Father so I'm sure you'll do great <3 NOT TO SET THE BAR LOW... Arakawa POV part of that was sooooooo cute but I am of course VERY MUCH LOOKING FORWARD regardless of what you've got in the oven :] I think it's funny we always end up with roughly the same concepts but I just shoehorn RGGJo into it instead

DO YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN THOUGH WITH HOW THE MARKETING FOR YLAD KEPT HAMMERING IN THE SON THING ONE WAY OR ANOTHER... BUT THE SCENE YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT IS FUNNY and honestly half of the things Westerners [<- counting myself just this once] find funny in RGG apparently aren't intentional so what's one more

Substitute Father haunts me since i really don't like it but i also know that One (1) person really enjoyed it so i don't want to delete it SOOO the most i can do at this point is try to write something better as an apology and try to forget.. and hopefully let arakawa FPOV in a better fic..

BUT YEAH LMAO they really werent subtle bout it in retrospect.... teehee..

[fierce-little-miana]

Hey I noticed you're interested in The Beast of Gevaudan, do you think it's possible it was a lion? I mean the descriptions of its leaping ability, its choice of prey, the location of the attack, its tail and coloring, the fact that it attacked with claws, and the way it scoured bones as if polished are all inconsistent with canines and consistent with a large feline

This an interesting, even if completely unexpected, question.

I will start my answer with a disclaimer. I am not an expert on the beast of Gévaudan, it is merely a subject that fascinates me (that’s what happen when you bring your 6-7 years old granddaughter to the scariest museum in the world folks!) and with which I enjoy a geographic proximity. However I lack academic reading about the subject (which I am trying to fix but the subject attracted a lot of terrible “academic” productions).

That being said let’s dive in. Could the beast of Gévaudan have been a lion? It is not impossible (since we will never know for sure what the beast was, catch me crying bitter tears over that) but, in my view it is highly unlikely.

Arguments in favor of a lion:

It seems to be a popular theory? After all this the one used in the french movie Le Pacte des Loups. It also seems to be or to have been a theory published in 2016 in the National Geographic Society.

Some of the beast’s physical characteristics such as its color (apparently some sort of light brow, borderline slightly ‘feu’), some sort of quiff (a mane?) around its head, a large head etc could work with a lion. Here keep in mind that we are talking about observed physical characteristics taken from witnesses of the living beast, not observation duly noted from autopsy (more about this later).

The strange behaviour of the beast while attacking could, as you say, also indicate a big feline. Here I am personally thinking about the fact that the beast seemed to have prefered attacking its preys at the head or at the neck (to the point that some victims were nearly or completely beheaded), which, from what I have heard is highly uncommun with wolves or wild canids. But way less uncommun with big felines.

There is also the inability for the witnesses/victims/hunters to precisely identify the nature of the beast (hence its name The BeastTM) which could indicate that the animal wasn’t naturally present in Gévaudan (or in France). And this is coherent with the idea of a lion since lions aren’t native to France since prehistoric times.

Arguments against a lion (aka everything else):

While wild lions have been noted to attack and specifically target humans, I have yet to hear about any such thing happening in France or even in Western Europe. If the beast had in fact been a lion it would be a unique and isolated case. However having a wild unidentified (but often recognized as a canid), animal attacking people for some time was a thing that happened several times in France alone. We call them bêtes féroces (ferocious beasts)

Also how did this lion get there? Did it escape from someone’s personal menagerie (did someone even had a lion in their menagerie in Gévaudan or even Auvergne at the time? This was hardly a rich region)? Did it escape from a circus (anachronistic term but your get my meaning)? In this case why did no-one signal the disappearance of a wild big feline?

Following the same idea how did it survive in this environment? I mean besides eating people of course (which the beast didn’t always do, sometimes it only killed its prey). Winters are pretty harsh around here, even by France standard. The average temperature for Saugue (the current place of the museum of the beast) in january is 0,8°C, (with a annual average of 8,3°C) and it snows there, often. This is not exactly your ideal environment for a lion. Keep in mind that the beast terrorised the region for three years (1764-1767) and didn’t stop during winters. So expect if we are talking about a mountain lion (no mane then?) or a barbary lion it seems difficult for it to have lived in the wild of Gévaudan for three years.

That is if we rule out human participation in the beast killing spree (which I don’t). But even if the beast was indeed the creature of a human being once again we are left with the question of where did it came from? Also a lion is considerably harder to hide from your neighbors/suspicious people (the region was a bit in a paranoid state at the time)/your servants than let’s say a weird canid that could find a spot in a, otherwise already full of imposing dogs, kennel.

Now to go back on the undefined nature of the beast. We saw earlier that it can play in favor of an exotic animal non-native to the region but here the lion sort of have a specific place in Europe. The lion was and still is an extremely present symbol in Europe: in heraldry, in religious art etc. You got to have someone who saw the beast that went “Hey that’s a lion!” at some point. (They even were persons send from Versailles at some point, that had certainly seen realistic artistic depictions of lion or even actual lions in the royal menagerie).

Which lead me to my last argument, the autopsy. The beast killed by Jacques Chastel, aka “the real beast”, underwent an autopsy that was carefully recorded (you can access part of it on the French wikipedia page of the beast which is gloriously complete, someone went the extra mile here and I can’t thank them enough). The persons performing the autopsy were unable to identify clearly the animal but did say that it was a canid. To give you a sample the animal was 99cm long (excluding the tail), its back-leg were around 45 cm long, it weighted around 50kg, and it had 42 teeths. Hardly a lion at all.

Here to continue pushing the lion hypothesis we would have to defend one of this 3 hypothesis. Hypothesis 1: Chastel’s kill is unrelated to the actual beast. But here we have to remember that the beast’s killing spree stopped after Chastel’s kill. So it’s either a big fat coincidence (which isn’t statistically impossible but it is unlikely) or there is fool play. Which leads me to hypothesis 2 Chastel did get rid of the beast or (knew that someone had or that the beast wouldn’t be a problem anymore) and delivered a fake beast. In this case I am left wondering why? I mean with the royal disinterest in the case in 1767 what would be the point of not delivering a lion? Who would have faced danger from the beast being a lion and from what authority (from a royal perspective the affair was officially closed)? This seems to complicate things for the pleasure of complicating them (and considering the already dubious context in which the beast was killed I don’t think we need to complicate them anymore). Or hypothesis 3 the autopsy record lies which lead me to the exact same questions I had for hypothesis 2 with the addition of why bother writing a report at all?

So in the end I would say that it is highly unlikely that the beast of Gévaudan was a lion. There are more concrete evidences pointing toward a or several canids (wolf, dog, hybrid etc).