Look at a demographic map of Europe, the current one, and you will find the answer: to this day there are far fewer people in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. This was even more true going back in time. And where there are people, especially when there are so many that they are organized in cities, there are no large mammals because they are hunted or actively exterminated by man.

Urban civilization spread across Europe starting in Greece and spreading first along the Mediterranean coast and then inland. Two thousand years ago during the Roman Empire, Germany and all the lands north and east of it lacked large cities. A thousand years later, under the Germanic empire of the Ottonians, the boundary of urban civilization shifted slightly eastward and barely included Poland and Bohemia.

Meanwhile, in Greece, where the first European cities were born, myths of heroes who succeed in ridding cities of the threat of lions, wild boars, buffaloes and various monsters had been told for three thousand years, proving that the prevailing sensibility was "where there are cities, there must be no dangerous animals."

However, the real extermination of Western European mammals occurred during the nineteenth century, when population booms combined with increasingly efficient firearms really made it possible to extirpate entire species from vast areas. In contrast, the century before is full of stories of anthropophagic wolves in the heartland of France, Germany and Italy. For example, the Bête du Gévaudan in Occitania, the bèstia de Cusagh in Lombardy or the Wolf von Ansbach in Bavaria.