When a 19-year-old girl was mauled to death by a wild bear in Romania last month, the country’s response was swift: double the number of animals culled every year.
In Italy, however, the killing of a female bear who injured a French hiker has sparked an agonised public debate on how to handle aggressive specimens within the country’s growing bear population.
“All other countries shoot dangerous bears. But here, shooting a bear is a kind of national drama,” said Piero Genovesi, head of wildlife co-ordination at the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, a government agency.
The contrasting responses to the two attacks highlight the difficulties European governments face when trying to preserve wildlife while guaranteeing public safety.
Brown bears are protected under EU law, and in Italy rewilding efforts led to a rebound of the species. But authorities are also facing increasing challenges in managing the fallout of the animals’ more frequent encounters with humans.
In Romania, the girl’s death last month sparked a national furore and demands for action, as grim photographs circulated on social media. Amid the outcry, lawmakers approved an increase in bear cull quotas, which will rise from 220 last year to 481 this year and in 2025.
“Everybody was saying ‘human lives first’ nonstop – this was the mantra,” said Csaba Domokos, a bear expert with the Milvus Group, a local environmental NGO.
Home to Europe’s largest brown bear population, now estimated at about 8,000, Romania has recorded the deaths of at least 27 people over the last two decades.
“It’s quite obvious that we have too many bears,” said Romanian environment minister Mircea Fechet. “If you look at the number of 112 [emergency] calls related to bear attacks, if you look at the [number of] people killed by bears ... they have exploded in the last few years.”
In Italy, which has a far smaller bear population, the impassioned debate over how to handle dangerous animals is still focused on individual bears and their history of aggression.
Even Vivien Triffaux, the French tourist wounded in the Italian Alps, said that news of the death of his attacker – a female bear with three young cubs – “has caused me deep sadness and a strong sense of guilt”.
“I had hoped it would be possible to find a compromise between guaranteeing the security of people and conserving biodiversity,” Triffaux wrote in a public letter.
Italy’s alpine bear population was nearly extinct, with just three old male bears left, when Rome started a rewilding programme in 1999. Nine bears were then relocated from Slovenia to a 620sq km natural reserve in the Trentino-Alto Adige region, a project partly funded by the EU.
The scheme was initially popular, with local authorities aiming to boost tourism. But an estimated 120 bears are now roaming in the Italian Alps, well beyond the boundaries of the fenceless park – a potential danger to hikers and residents alike.
“You cannot segregate bears from humans – there is no land just for animals in Trentino,” Genoesi said. “We need to coexist.”
Last year, 26-year-old Andrea Papi was fatally attacked by a bear while jogging near his home – the first such case in Italy in 150 years.
The same animal, known as JJ4, had attacked a father and son hiking on Mount Peller in 2020, but Italy’s then environment minister declined to follow scientists’ advice to have the bear put down.
Papi’s death prompted local authorities to issue a kill order for JJ4, but animal rights activists successfully challenged it in court. The animal was instead captured and put in an enclosure, or “bear jail”.
Regional authorities moved faster after this year’s attack on the French hiker, with the female bear shot just hours after her death warrant was signed.
“They issued the order in the evening, and they killed the animal at night,” said Claudia Taccani, a legal adviser for the International Organisation for Animal Protection. “We didn’t have time to defend the bears’ interests.”
Italian environment minister Gilberto Pichetto Frattin argues that killing individual bears cannot be a solution to “a reckless choice” made 25 years ago to reintroduce bears to promote alpine tourism. Instead, he proposes sterilising bears – a solution that has not been tested elsewhere.
Genovesi of the government agency warned that failure to deal with dangerous bears would backfire and turn local residents hostile. “You need to remove the dangerous bears rapidly, without all this discussion,” he said.
In Romania, hunting bears had long been a favourite pastime of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed in 1989. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Romanian authorities allowed the lucrative business to continue.
But in 2016, amid pressure from scientists and green groups, Bucharest banned sport hunting for bears. A year later, however, it introduced shooting permits to eliminate “problematic” animals that repeatedly wander into villages and damage livestock or property.
Conservationists have warned that increasing the cull quotas risked targeting the wrong bears.
“Foreign hunters that come and pay a lot of money will want to hunt bears in the forest and pay for ‘the wilderness experience,’ not lurk on the edge of the town waiting for a bear to come out from the trash bin,” said Domokos. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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