An investigative report into Europe’s growing bear population and how it is being (mis)managed
Most Europeans – particularly in western Europe – have never seen a bear in the wild. But everyone has an idea of one.
As symbols, they are present in the daily lives of millions: in children’s books, in cartoons, in the names we give to the constellations in the night sky. There are bears in the coats of arms of three western European capitals (Bern, Berlin and Madrid) not to mention countless regions and towns – a legacy of the heraldic high point of the Middle Ages perhaps, when actual, real-life bears were far more prevalent across the continent than today.
“There was once a single bear population across Europe”, journalist Michael Bird reminds us in an article for the Romanian publication Scena9. Over many centuries, deforestation, hunting and the growth of human settlement, has fragmented the continent’s bear population into disparate islands defined mostly by geographic features (forests, mountains) rather than political boundaries. A long decline set in.
In some countries, that process is now going into reverse. (Bird lists France, Spain, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Albania, Kosovo, Slovenia, Latvia, Belarus and Poland). As it does, the question of how humans should co-exist with their ursine cousins is being reformulated, often intersecting with conflicting attitudes, cultural shifts and deeper anxieties about climate change or rural human depopulation. The article is super interesting. Even better is the documentary which goes with it – available here.
The relationship between humans and bears is inescapable. The dynamics of one population affect the other. When houses are abandoned in depopulated rural areas, bears move into the ruins. Human settlement tends to come with things like beehives, domestic animals. Bears are happy to eat what humans leave behind. (Bird cites a study of bear excrement by biologist Laszlo Gal in the vicinity of the Romanian spa town of Băile Tușnad which found that five percent of what local bears eat is – plastic).
The factors which are now accentuating human-bear contact are myriad. Shorter winters – as a result of anthropogenic climate change – have reduced bear hibernation. Contrary to what one might imagine, forests subject to regular commercial logging are more attractive to bears than untouched forests because there tends to be more light between the young trees, and therefore greater coverage of the kinds of plants bears like to eat at ground level. New roads intersecting bear habitat make it more likely bears will have to cross them, and interact with humans in the process. For female bears with cubs, proximity to humans may represent a kind of protection from males (and a possible source of food) – but it also increases the possibility of inter-special conflict.
There has been an increase in bear-on-human violence, the article suggests. This is particularly acute in Romania, where most victims are shepherds or farmers. But there have been other cases too. The mayor of a village in the Italian Dolomites tells the story of a twenty-six year old killed while out hiking by a bear known as JJ4. Afterwards, Lorenzo Cicolini says, “people were terrified”. But locals were not allowed to kill JJ4 themselves. “We have the impression that bear management takes precedence over human life”, the mayor complains: “who will be next?”
But it’s hardly one way. Some bear advocates blame humans, pointing to instances where farmers have tried to kill bears to punish them for eating their livestock, and wound up as victims themselves. An Albanian source describes the problem of illegal hunting with guns (in the past surplus army strychnine was used to poison the bears). Aleksandër Trajçe, director of a local conservation charity, describes how mother bears would be killed to get at the cubs and sell them. (It’s unclear whether this is ongoing but a decade ago, a cub price was estimated at 300-800 to euros apiece).
Some worry that bans on bear hunting – these have been illegal in Romania since 2017 – have emboldened the bears. Bogdan Cotescu, a forestry worker in Râșnov, Romania notes that these days “instead of running away, they just stand there and smell you… it’s not comfortable to have a bear sniffing you from half a meter away”. Scientific studies are inconclusive.
Even at the basic level of population management, does hunting work? Slovenia has an annual bear hunting quota equal to one quarter of the country’s bear population. Yet it is still growing. Some conservationists say bears are in effect being artificially fed for hunting by foreign tourists: “Slovenia has become a bear farm”.
As to the problem of bear-on-human violence, maybe it’s a case of a few bad apples. “The solution isn’t to shoot bears randomly and sporadically”, says Maša Cerjak Kastelic from the Ljubljana Society for the Protection of Animals, “but to kill the troublemakers”.
None of this stops the human fascination with bears, wanting to be near them or to photograph them, ideally from close up. In the Abruzzo national park in Italy, it’s illegal to come within 300 metres of a bear. On the Transfăgărășan highway in Romania it’s illegal to take photos of bears. The article has a picture of lines of slow-moving cars, with tourists happily snapping away and a few bears along the side.
In some parts of south-eastern Europe, bears were once kept as mascots for restaurants, even petrol stations, monasteries and factories. That’s no longer allowed in Kosovo the article notes, but it still happens in Romania, Slovenia and Albania. Instead, there are now bear sanctuaries, often housing former mascot bears. A sanctuary in Zărnești in Transylvania has 132 bears from around Europe, including seven from war-torn Ukraine. When the first bears arrived they had no idea what to do with the berries put out for them to eat. “They had been fed on bread or corn for twenty years”, Cristina Lapis of the Libearty Bear Sanctuary explains. They had to learn what to eat again, how to hibernate even. “Freedom is learned”, she says: “we too had to learn freedom after the revolution” (that is, the overthrow of Communism).
At the Pristina Bear Sanctuary in Kosovo, established by an Austrian NGO which has projects all over the world, Afrim Mahmuti tells the story of Stivi, a brown bear thought to have been born in the wild in 2013, then captured (mother presumed killed) and put on display in a restaurant. Living in a small cage with another bear, the two got in a fight, from resulted in Stivi losing his sight. (The bear is named after Stevie Wonder).
These days Stivi is described as a “really happy bear”. He loves watermelon.
The full original article in Romanian here. The associated film (and website) is here.
Unlike other articles Translator has summarised for our Dispatches, this article, though published in Romanian, is itself partially the product of translation itself. Bucharest-based British journalist Michael Bird is the author; Laura Sesovici is credited as translator. The article was written as part of a cross-border investigative journalism project.
Bears Uncovered. Tot ce-ai vrut să știi despre urși (și n-ai avut pe cine să întrebi), Scena9, 13 May 2024.
Scena 9 is a Romanian publication, mostly focussed on culture.
