In late March, a bear attacked and killed a 59-year-old man near his home in central Slovakia. Prime Minister Robert Fico's government then decided last week to allow the culling of 350 brown bears - about a quarter of the country's total population.
Fico believes that the measure has sufficient support among the people: "We cannot live in a country where people are afraid to enter the forest," said Fico.
The number of attacks is increasing
Speaking to ARD, Filip Kufa, State Secretary at the Ministry of Environmental Protection, emphasizes that the risk from bears has increased in recent years:
"The number of incidents is increasing, more people are being injured, material damage is increasing – even traffic accidents involving bears have become more frequent," Kufa said.
The decision to reduce the population is a necessary reaction to such a development.
According to estimates, there are currently about 1.275 bears living in Slovakia. The first recorded fatal bear attack on a human in the EU member state - in the last 100 years - occurred in June 2021. Slovakia is the second country in Europe in terms of the number of attacks, after Romania - which has a population of about 6-7 thousand bears and where in 2023 it was allowed to shoot almost 500 of these animals.
The planned cull, as Kufa claims, does not threaten the survival of the species - its numbers will only be reduced to a "healthy level".
"If you have mice in your house that are destroying your things – what do you do? You catch the mice. Not necessarily all of them, but after a while the damage decreases."
A case for the European Commission?
Statements like these, argues Miroslava Abelova of Greenpeace Slovakia, are proof of the incompetence of a ministry that has "lost sight of nature conservation" in Fico's government. She calls the bear cull plans "completely reckless" and criticizes the government's disregard for scientific knowledge and preventive measures.
According to environmental organizations, Slovakia's planned reduction also violates European nature protection law, given that the brown bear has been a strictly protected species in the EU since 1992. According to the European directive, animals can only be killed if there is no other solution to resolve the conflict.
Greenpeace has already announced that it will take action at the European level against the Slovak government's decision and has called on the European Commission to intervene. The international appeal should further increase the pressure on the government.
Better protection through more education?
Conservation organizations do not deny that the number of conflicts between humans and bears has increased in recent years. However, according to Abel, even a radical cull will not solve the cause of the problem, only its symptoms.
"A bear will generally only attack a human if it perceives them as a threat. So it's not a question of seeing humans as prey. But if we have poorly secured food scraps and crops like corn near bear habitat, we encourage encounters between humans and bears," says Abel.
Greenpeace is therefore calling for greater emphasis on preventive measures. These include, among other things, information campaigns that explain to the population how to behave in areas where bears are present, as well as technical solutions that would prevent bears from foraging near populated areas - such as fencing and special bear-proof containers.
"We can't simply remove bears from the landscape. Instead, we need to learn how to coexist with them," Abel emphasizes.
She points out that a responsible attitude towards wildlife and the long-term protection of their habitats can also benefit the development of ecotourism in the region.
Bear stew?
The State Secretary at the Ministry of Environmental Protection, Filip Kufa, however, does not accept the arguments of environmentalists. He says that preventive measures have been implemented for years, and many prevention programs are still ongoing. However, everything has proven to be ineffective. In the end, he says, the sober mathematical and statistical truth applies: fewer bears - fewer conflicts.
And bear culling, in his opinion, can be a special tourist incentive: already last year, a restaurant in the Tatra Mountains had bear goulash on the menu that had been legally removed. Legitimate and lawful use – and one of the forms of "human-bear encounter" that he advocates, says Kufa.
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