It was May 2001, and the team behind the pioneering project to return the brown bear to the Alps was overjoyed.
"Today, Jurka is back!", they announced proudly.
"A beautiful 90 kilogram specimen joins the bear family imported from Slovenia."
Jurka peeked out of the transport cage and then descended the ramp into her new wooded home, the Adamello Brenta Natural Park in Trentino.
In most of the Alps, bears have been hunted to the brink of extinction and the only remaining specimens are stuffed in museums.
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Now an EU-funded project called Life Ursus has begun to slowly turn back time.
Today, their population has grown to about 100 bears, beyond their most optimistic projections.
But after a series of attacks on humans, the bear's future is now in serious doubt.
What's going on?
Is mass panic in the Alps triggered by a tiny number of isolated incidents?
Or is there really a pattern of unusually problematic behavior among returning bears?
Return of the carnivore
In the early days, most of the locals supported the project Life Ursus.
Wildlife groups and scientists hailed it as a conservation triumph and a potential model for brown bear recovery.
Most bears lived shyly in the forest, feeding on insects, herbs and berries, and avoided people.
A few crossed the Alps, appearing in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
Ultimately, environmental activists hoped, such expansion could help create a kind of alpine bear belt — a transboundary habitat that would ensure the species' long-term survival.
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Today, that picture looks less cheerful.
Jurka now lives behind a heavily fortified fence in a wildlife park in Germany, relocated from Trentino due to a potential threat to humans.
This year Jurka's daughter JJ4, who was protecting her cubs, killed a jogger named Andrea Papi.
It was JJ4's second attack and one of seven bear attacks on humans in Trentino in the last decade.
Other bears slaughtered livestock and ransacked beehives.
In many parts of the Alps, there is heated debate over what the bear's return means for the local population.
Some people feel that their freedom and security are threatened.
"The Trentino case really scared the people here," says Mihaela Skuban, a wildlife biologist who researches bear-human coexistence in Tyrol, on the Austrian side of the Alps.
"They think, 'What if something like that happens here?'"
Skuban spent 16 years studying bears in Slovakia, which has about 1.700 bears, part of a population of 7.630 in the entire Carpathians.
By comparison, Tyrol has only one or two bears, which wandered here from Trentino.
Even such a sparse population, however, was enough to cause concern, she says.
"People come to me and ask me: Can I still go jogging? Can I let my child in the garden? You'd think it's funny, but there's genuine insecurity and fear."
Understanding why bears might come into conflict with humans, several experts say, begins with understanding the bears themselves.
At first glance, researching bear behavior is reassuring from a human perspective: we are not part of their diet and are usually not hunted.
Giulia Bombieri, a wildlife-human conflict specialist at MUSE, the Science Museum in Trento, Italy, and her colleagues analyzed around 600 brown bear attacks around the world.
Their findings suggest that when bears attack, it is usually to defend themselves from something they perceive as a threat.
A broader analysis of attacks by all large carnivores in 2023 showed a similar pattern of mostly defensive attacks in bear species (such as American and Asian black bears, brown bears, sloths and polar bears).
Also, bears are fatal only in nine percent of cases.
Unlike them, when big cats such as lions and leopards attack people, 65 percent of the cases are fatal, which does not mean that there is no cause for concern, says Bombieri.
For starters, not all bears are shy, and even if they are, they will attack "if they're in the wrong situation," she says, adding that a female with cubs may, for example, attack when ambushed.
"Each bear has an extremely individual character and its own life story," says Claudio Grof.
He is the coordinator of the Department of Large Carnivores of the Autonomous Province of Trento, which monitors the bears from the reintroduction project.
"However, in Europe, only a small number of animals, perhaps three to five percent, of the bear population, are what we call 'problematic'.
"That could mean they're bold, going into villages, and getting close to people, which can be dangerous, or, like JJ4, they could be very protective of cubs, which is necessarily abnormal behavior, but it's behaviors that are for people unacceptable," he says.
In European media headlines and in risk reports, there is a special name for such miscreants: "problem bears" - orsi problematici in Italian, Problembären in German.
It has become a catch-all term for bears that have attracted attention for very different reasons: bold bears and bears that tend to react defensively.
However, distinguishing between these two types of "problem bears" is crucial when it comes to preventing attacks, experts say.
Jurka, for example, belongs to the category of bold bears.
Looking back on it today, her relaxed arrival could have been a subtle nod to that, Grof says.
He was part of the team that welcomed her to her new habitat, and watched over her and others for years.
"When we brought here 10 bears from Slovenia, there were maybe one or two that already had this kind of problematic behavior. It is possible that Jurka was already like that. When we saw her getting off the truck, she didn't immediately disappear into the forest like the others. She stayed, she didn't rush, even though there were people there," he recalls.
"Maybe - and this is just a hypothesis - it was a sign that it was an animal that was not afraid of people," says Grof.
In Trentino, Jurka repeatedly entered the villages to raid chicken coops and beehives, becoming bolder over time.
She and her cubs caused about 50 percent of the total bear damage in this area.
The count recalls how she resisted attempts to intimidate her, even with dogs.
Such bold behavior is known to be "food-conditioned," meaning that the bear has learned that humans are an easy source of food: a situation that can be dangerous for both humans and bears.
There's a common saying among bear experts, mentioned by several people I interviewed for this article: "A fed bear is a dead bear."
This is because a food-conditioned bear will most likely need to be put to sleep.
In its early stages, food conditioning can seem harmless.
The bear could persistently enter towns and villages, and rummage through trash cans or hang around tourist attractions.
If such a bear is put to sleep or captured, it can cause public displeasure, since the animal does not have to act as a threat at that time.
However, if a bear loses its fear of humans, its behavior may escalate to breaking into cars or attacking people to defend its food cache.
Bears at the bus stop
Skuban calls such bears Dorfbären: "village bears".
She remembers them well from her life in Slovakia.
"I didn't trust village bears, because I would think, what's the matter with him, why doesn't he run away? Are they going to defend their trash can from me?” she says.
"They're the kind of bears that hang out at the bus stop at eight in the morning." Even if there are only a few, they can influence people's opinion about the entire population. Because we are more inclined to notice one bear at a bus stop or in a public park than to think about how there are 10 or 15 in the forest that are not bothering anyone."
Part of her project, which is funded by the non-profit Stiftung für Bären (Bear Foundation), is to share some of the insights from Slovakia with the locals in Tyrol, for whom the idea of living with bears is completely new.
It's natural for people to be concerned about carnivores, she says.
"When we hear about predators, it awakens a primal fear in us."
For Jurka, food conditioning eventually ended her days in the wild.
She was caught in 2007.
At the time, there was no suitable shelter for her, so she was temporarily placed in a bear pit in the medieval Italian monastery of San Romedio, named after the saint who supposedly rode a tamed bear.
From there, Jurka was transferred to another shelter for bears, and then, in 2010, to the Alternative Wolf and Bear Park in the German Black Forest.
Three years later, another food conditioned bear from the project, DJ3, also known as Isa, joined her there.
"Captivity is a disaster for wild animals," says Bernd Nonenmacher, director of the park, which is run by the Bear Foundation.
"We see it very clearly with Isa and Jurka. Sure, they have a golden cage here, but it's still captivity. Before, they had mountains, lakes, they could go wherever they wanted."
Jurka's enclosure is as bear-friendly as possible, with all the trees and a stream, Nonenmacher says.
However, she tried to escape countless times.
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Now a full-grown 260-pound bear, she used to gather twigs in her enclosure, then try to use them to lower the electric fence surrounding her, allowing her to escape, Nonenmacher adds.
It's a trick she learned during her time in Trentino, he says, when she used branches to lower electric fences around beehives.
"Her desire for freedom is undiminished and that will never change."
Not only did Jurka's boldness lead to her downfall, but she may have passed on fatal habits to her cubs, inadvertently creating a whole clan of trouble bears.
Jurka's first born was Bruno, also known as JJ1 based on his parents' initials (Jurka and a Slovenian bear named Jože).
He was deemed extremely dangerous due to his lack of fear of humans, was eventually shot after wandering into Germany, and is now a stuffed exhibit in a museum in Munich.
Jurka's third offspring, JJ3, was shot in Switzerland after persistently digging for food in garbage cans near towns.
The fifth, JJ5, died after being caught and mauled, after breaking into chicken coops and picking through bins near people's homes.
"It is a tragic story.
"Bears are very intelligent animals, with very individual personalities and different preferences, but they really learn their skills on their own. And that happened with Jurka and her descendants. They learned from mom that where there are people, there is food," says Nonenmacher.
However, Grof points out that even within families, bears can be very different.
For example, JJ4 was never conditioned to food.
"JJ4 never went into the villages, even though she grew up with a mother who did."
Cubs don't have to become like their mothers, he says. "It's not that automatic."
However individual these bear-human conflicts may be, research shows that a few simple steps could have been avoided.
First, blocking access to food can prevent bears from developing bad habits.
And secondly, when it comes to common bears, there are things we can do to avoid running into them.
"Bears are large predators by nature, but they don't specifically hunt people. We usually provoke these attacks by surprising them," says wildlife scientist Tom Smith of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who has spent 31 years conducting field studies among bears.
"Many of us who have studied them for a long time know that with the right training and education, we can greatly minimize the number of human-bear conflicts. It's not like walking around with tigers or other big cats that really see you as food."
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One of his main recommendations is to make sure the bear can hear you approaching.
"If you announce your presence, and therefore avoid surprising them, they will usually obediently move out of the way, bypassing that potential interaction."
"Making our presence known is by far the most important thing we can do."
This advice applies to all three North American bear species, Smith says: black bear, brown bear, grizzly bear, and polar bear.
"It turns out that they (all three bear species) rarely hunt humans. Most conflicts are sudden encounters."
Raising your voice while talking and clapping are the most effective ways to get a bear's attention, Smith says.
However, he says that "bear bells," which sound while walking, may not be loud enough to attract a bear's attention.
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An analysis of nearly 700 human-bear encounters in Alaska by Smith and his colleagues found that the likelihood of an attack is significantly reduced when you are in a group.
In areas with poor visibility, making noise by talking or clapping was also helpful.
When bears hear people approaching, they usually take cover, Smith says.
Moreover, the seven bear attacks in Trentino, which have taken place in the last decade, generally fit these known conflict patterns.
Most were sudden encounters between bears, often with cubs, and hikers, joggers or mushroom pickers.
One involved a food-conditioned bear that had previously followed humans.
It is also worth thinking about the daily rhythm of bears, says Mikaela Skuban, a biologist.
Bears are usually active at night, and go to sleep early in the morning, around 6-7 o'clock.
"Unfortunately, that's often the time when people want to go for a run before work," she says.
"It's also an ideal time if you really want to see a bear. And that's why the really important advice is to go to the forest during the day instead, and avoid the thicket, and then the risk of encounter will be very small."
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Running, cycling and hiking
Some popular mountain sports could increase the risk of a dangerous encounter with a bear, Smith says.
This is because the main challenge is to avoid surprising the bear.
"Running is a problem. Mountain biking is a problem," he says.
"Why? Because they're usually solo participants, and they're pretty quiet, they move fast, and bears and humans use the same trails."
Unlike them, hiking may not be so risky.
"Rock climbers like everyone else just need to pay attention, ride next to each other, wear deterrents [such as bear spray, where it's legal] and make noise while crossing their mountain obstacles," he suggests.
"While you're climbing, the bears won't pose a threat to you, of course. I don't have a single incident of a climber getting into trouble, so that should be comforting."
Skuban points out one surprisingly risky activity: mushroom picking.
Cool, damp places are ideal for mushrooms, she says, but they're also popular places for bears to nap.
"A bear will usually run away if it sees you, but there may be cases where it will hit you because it's scared."
She also doesn't recommend looking for cub bears for photography.
For Bombieri, who lives and works in Trentino, the most important step is the willingness to adapt.
"The first lesson we have to learn is that we can't do everything we put our minds to when we're in a bear area."
"And that's probably the hardest lesson to learn."
Smith, who visited Trentino this year to meet with local bear researchers, recommends carrying bear spray to deter bears that get too close.
"Going out into nature without company and the ability to unequivocally say 'no' to a bear is very bad." I wouldn't do that."
His research showed that the spray was successful in 98 percent of close encounters.
But that spray is illegal in a good part of Europe, for fear that criminals might use it on people.
"If they're going into 'bear territory' without any defenses, people have a right to feel uncomfortable about that," says Smith.
"I sympathize with that sense of vulnerability."
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Skuban is similarly sympathetic and especially points out the plight of farmers.
They are among the most vocal critics of the bear's return - which has coincided with the return of another large carnivore, the wolf.
In several Alpine countries, farmers took to the streets to protest the predators, and some removed sheep from their summer pastures after finding livestock massacred.
"This is a new situation and people have to learn to live with bears again," says Skuban, adding that it is crucial to ask the farmer what practical help they want to feel safe.
She worked as a shepherd and researched different methods of protecting herds, such as keeping sheepdogs.
But not all solutions work for all environments, she says.
In alpine areas where tourism is an important source of income, farmers worry that extremely protective dogs could attack hikers.
However, she hopes that a solution can be found.
"If we are patient, and keep talking to each other, I think we will succeed. A better system for farmers may be needed, and perhaps better scientific monitoring. It's a process, maybe it will take a long time," says Skuban.
Furthermore, while it's important to remove problem bears, "it doesn't mean removing bears just because they're there," she says.
In Trentino, the question of how to deal with problem bears as a last resort, sedation or capture, turned out to be particularly tricky.
"We've had tremendous difficulty enforcing the problem bear rules," Grof says.
In principle, there are clear official guidelines for this in Europe, supported by bear specialists around the world: after careful assessment, a bear declared dangerous to humans must be captured or euthanized.
The decision was made by the Count's department after the first JJ4 attack on humans in 2020.
"We have given the order to put that bear to sleep."
However, animal rights activists contested this and the court eventually overturned the decision.
New attempts to get permission to remove it also failed.
"And then that bear attacked again," says Groff.
"Very understandably, it upset people very much who saw that a bear that had injured two people was allowed to roam free until it killed a third."
Worst of all, that decision led to the death of one person.
"The young man died because we were not allowed to put the bear to sleep."
Grof points out that "nobody wants to put a bear to sleep, certainly none of us who are trying to save them."
"But sometimes you have to sacrifice a problem animal for the sake of all the other bears living peacefully," he says.
And, in the end, human life is more important than the preservation of bears, he adds.
According to Grof, living with bears requires a compromise on both sides: people have to take precautions, and bears "can't do whatever they want."
"There are some who say that bears should be left alone in the forest, and the solution is for people not to go into the forest," says Grof.
"But that doesn't make any sense, because people go to the forest to hunt, to find firewood, to pick mushrooms, to run, to ride a bike, and it will always be like that. The forest also belongs to the bear, but it does not belong only to the bear."
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