It was round 5 pm on March 15, and the sunshine was fading quick, when Constantin and Tatiana had been attacked by the bear. The younger couple, aged 29 and 31 and recognized in native media experiences solely by their first names, had been Belarusians dwelling in Poland. But Constantin had been working for the winter as a ski teacher in Jasná, a preferred resort in neighboring Slovakia. The winter season was coming to an finish, and on a time off he’d determined to go climbing together with his girlfriend beneath the 4,718 foot-high peak of Na Jame, within the Slovak nationwide park surrounding the resort.
What occurred subsequent just isn’t precisely clear, however newspaper experiences counsel that when the couple encountered the bear—a younger male weighing about 265 kilos—they ran in numerous instructions. Finding himself alone, Constantin tried calling Tatiana. When he failed to get a response, he known as mountain rescue. It was darkish once they finally discovered Tatiana’s physique, with the assistance of a search canine. She’d apparently fallen down a ravine, sustaining deadly accidents to her head.
As with earlier bear-related fatalities, each in Slovakia and throughout Europe, the incident has sparked accusations that conservationists are defending bears on the expense of individuals’s security. In 2021, a 57-year-old man was killed by a bear in the identical nationwide park, stoking group tensions about their presence and main to requires a cull. As it stands, nevertheless, looking the animals is banned below each Slovakian and European legislation, and consultants argue vociferously {that a} lack of training—moderately than a deal with conservation—is the first reason behind the issue.
“It’s really kicked off here, with the press and politicians I think making some unjustified statements,” says British-born zoologist Robin Rigg. A specialist in giant carnivores, Rigg is the chair of the Slovak Wildlife Society, which he arrange in 1998, two years after transferring to the nation. Initial experiences urged that Tatiana might need been killed by the bear itself moderately than by her fall, Rigg explains. “And it’s been said in public—actually by someone from the Ministry of the Environment—that it was a predatory attack. But I don’t see the evidence for that.”
Although the animal was close to the physique when rescuers discovered Tatiana, “that doesn’t mean the bear was intending to kill and consume her,” Rigg says. He stresses that he hasn’t seen all of the proof, so any conclusions are provisional. But he has seen among the grisly photographs that had been leaked to the media, “and none of them show signs of consumption.” Puncture marks discovered within the younger lady’s leg, he says, “look like claw marks—they’re not signs of feeding.”
“It’s extremely rare in Europe to have predatory attacks, and it’s not a common thing anywhere in the world,” Riggs says. This incident occurred in an space the place bears are identified to hibernate, at a time of yr when they’re simply waking up. “And what can sometimes happen is that the bear reacts aggressively in defending itself, which is what I think is most likely to have happened in this case—that it was startled by these two people appearing,” Rigg says.
Unfortunately, this sort of nuance doesn’t usually characteristic in protection of bear assaults. “You’re actually more likely, statistically, to get hit by lightning or have an allergic reaction to a bee sting,” Rigg says, “but people don’t worry as much about that as they do about a big animal with sharp teeth and claws. It goes back to an instinctive fear that’s been with us since prehistoric times.”
The argument that Slovakia’s bears are nothing to be afraid of was additional undermined when footage emerged of an animal galloping down a foremost road in Liptovský Mikuláš simply two days after Tatiana’s dying. The animal was filmed lunging aggressively at pedestrians, who jumped over fences to escape. No one was severely harm, however the video went viral. “And now,” Rigg says, “we’ve had these two incidents within 48 hours of each other, within a few kilometers of each other. So the tendency is to look at them together and ask, ‘What should we do about bears?’”
It’s a query that’s turn into more and more urgent in recent times—not simply in Slovakia however all through Europe. Having been hunted to the purpose of extinction in lots of international locations, brown bears had their “strictly protected” standing enshrined in EU legislation in 1992. In most areas the place they’re current, bear populations are rising, and there at the moment are an estimated 17,000 brown bears dwelling in rural areas throughout the continent. The restoration of this keystone species has been celebrated as an enormous win by biologists and biodiversity consultants—but it surely’s not been with out its issues.
In the Pyrenees, the mountains that straddle the border between France and Spain, French and Spanish farmers’ unions, sick of coping with injury to crops, beehives, and livestock, have known as for bear numbers to be lower. In the northern Italian province of Trentino, the place bears had been reintroduced as a part of an EU-funded rewilding undertaking, the tragic dying of path runner Andrea Papi in April 2023 introduced simmering resentments effervescent up to the floor. To the horror of native scientists, Trentino’s right-wing populist president, Maurizio Fugatti, proposed killing half of the rigorously nurtured inhabitants of round 120 bears in a single day.
Yet, consultants say, culling bears is much from the easiest way to forestall future tragedies. In the wake of Andrea Papi’s dying, the native pure historical past museum invited Tom Smith, a bear administration specialist from Utah’s Brigham Young University, to give a discuss how such points are handled in North America. In an indication of how excessive group tensions had been working, the museum took the weird step of posting an armed guard on the entrance.
In his speak, Smith urged that the options had been comparatively easy: “What you have here isn’t necessarily a bear problem, it’s a people problem,” he stated. Unlike in North America, the place individuals in bear areas have grown up with the animals, Europeans dwelling close to lately recovered populations don’t essentially know the way to behave. But with some fundamental bear-awareness coaching—of the sort that’s taught “in kindergarten” in some Canadian provinces—the variety of harmful or deadly encounters might be vastly decreased.
Smith runs the North American Human-Bear Conflict Database, which comprises detailed info on 2,175 historic assaults, with “a quarter-million data points.” “What I’ve learned by studying these events,” he informed the group, “is that 60 percent of them were totally unnecessary—and could have been avoided if people had behaved differently.” In an interview a number of days later, Smith talked particularly about Papi’s dying, telling WIRED, “I can go through the details and say, ‘You should never do that, or that, or that,’ and it’s not victim blaming, it’s trying to say, look, this was fully preventable.”
Tragically, this additionally seems to have been the case in Slovakia. “Unfortunately, the route that they chose was a very risky one,” Rigg says. “It’s not a recognized hiking route, and it’s a part of the park that’s strictly protected, so they shouldn’t have been there. Added to that, it’s a limestone area, and that’s an area I’d expect there would be denning bears.” The encounter occurred round nightfall, when crepuscular creatures like brown bears have a tendency to be extra lively.