“Carnivorous beasts acquiring a taste for human flesh”: when wild wolves still plagued Luxembourg
From Today.RTL.lu:
Luxembourg’s last wolf was officially killed by the examining magistrate Edouard Wolff (oh the irony) near Olingen on 24 April 1893. After the recent wolf sightings on Belgium not far from the Luxembourg border, most residents were happy to hear that wolves might return to roam the Grand Duchy’s forests once more. Fair to say this would not have been the case a couple of centuries ago…
In an early book on Luxembourg’s religious history, Jesuit Jean Bertholet (1688-1755) offers a rather colourful account of a wolf plague that allegedly took place in the Grand Duchy in 1045: “The men who died in the countryside and remained without burial, were eaten by wolves; these carnivorous beasts acquiring a taste for human flesh. [The wolves] later also threw themselves upon the living, and killed a great number of them.” Bertholet also came up with an explanation for the attacks: in his view, they represented “Heaven’s anger.”
