Slovakia has said it will allow the shooting of bears that stray into towns and villages, triggering accusations that politicians have scapegoated the animals to win points in an election this weekend and fuelling a broader European debate over the merits of rewilding with large mammals.
A proposed law announced this week would allow security services to shoot brown bears within a 500-metre radius of a settlement. It comes after a male brown bear attack in the Slovak town of Liptovský Mikuláš last month injured five people, two of whom were hospitalised.
“We already know today that this year will be the most dangerous in Slovak history in terms of unwanted bear encounters”, Slovak environment minister and deputy prime minister Tomáš Taraba told the Financial Times.
Taraba said bear attacks had increased from just one in 2016 to 12 last year. Slovakia had recorded nine bear attacks, including a fatal one, this year up to the end of March, he said. The environment ministry blamed “a significant change in the natural behaviour of bears and the loss of their shyness in front of humans”.
Environmental campaigners say the Slovak government is vastly overstating the issue and is using a crackdown on bear attacks to score political points ahead of the final run-off for the country’s presidential election on Saturday.
Michal Wiezik, an ecologist and MEP from the opposition party Progressive Slovakia, told the FT the law change pushed by Taraba was “total madness” and a ploy to win support ahead of the vote.
“It’s part of the campaign,” he said. “Setting the perimeter around each town and village, and to allow the shooting of a bear that trespasses that perimeter — this is not a law, this is madness.” If the law were enacted, he said, “then we would lose a lot of bears and that would be a huge loss for nature in Slovakia”.
The role of the Slovak president is largely ceremonial, but the election is seen as a test of pro-Russian sentiment after Robert Fico took power as prime minister last year with a populist and nationalist agenda under which he has overhauled part of the judicial system.
Taraba, who ran on the list of the ultranationalist Slovak National party in the 2023 election, said in announcing the legislation that the Slovak government “rejects the theories of some pseudo-conservationists and liberals that bears have a greater right to life than humans”.
“In a short time, we will give the opposition a chance to show whether they are on the side of the citizens, their health and lives, or various non-governmental organisations without responsibility, who say that bears are herbivores and citizens are not in danger,” he added.
Jozef Ridron, a Slovak representative of the NGO Birdlife, said the new government was “strongly anti-nature protection” and Taraba was trying to score “political points”.
The bear that rampaged through Liptovský Mikuláš was later shot, although environmentalists have questioned whether the armed patrol killed the correct bear because the one that was shot was female, not male. It was a “completely different bear”, Wiezik said.
Robin Rigg, chair of the Slovak Wildlife Society, said incidents of recent attacks were “rare and unfortunate accidents that were probably triggered by human activity and behaviour” that would still likely have happened even if the new legislation had been in place.
Slovakia is not alone in its concerns about a rise in bear numbers and attacks on humans.
In Romania, home to Europe’s largest brown bear population, 26 people have been killed in the past 20 years and about 300 severely injured — and conflicts are increasing, according to Romanian environment minister Mircea Fechet. “We are mostly talking about tourists, or shepherds that were only doing their jobs high up in the mountains,” he told the FT.
Fechet said that while the issue must be discussed “based on scientific data”, he received images every week of dead animals and people “badly injured” by bears, as well as calls from parents worried their children could be attacked while waiting for a school bus.
Slovakia, Romania and Finland raised the issue at a meeting of EU environment ministers last month, appealing to fellow ministers to change EU law to allow selective culling.
The three member states urged the European Commission to work with experts to better monitor brown bear populations and quickly downgrade their protected status in the Habitats Directive, a cornerstone of the EU’s biodiversity policy.
“We don’t want a tragedy to happen,” Fechet said, adding that the directive, which stipulates problematic bears can be killed as a last resort, might not be fit for purpose. “Maybe we don’t have to wait to see if a bear is aggressive.”
Vlad Gheorghe, an independent Romanian MEP, criticised the proposal in a letter addressed to the EU’s environment ministers, saying that downgrading bears’ protected status would “endanger biodiversity and natural heritage conservation” in a third of the bloc’s member states.
He also alleged the proposal was being pushed for political gain ahead of the European parliament elections in June and that it was “essential to keep the EU environmental policy free from electoral considerations”.
The commission said preventing bear conflicts could include increasing awareness in areas with bears, better waste management, and non-lethal methods such as shooting problematic bears with rubber bullets, or relocating them.
“While attacks on humans are very rare events, they are tragic whenever they occur,” an EU official said. “The protection of human life is and remains everyone’s priority.”
Discussions over protection for bears follow an effort to downgrade the conservation status of the wolf, proposed by Brussels in December.
Diplomats met in Brussels this week to discuss a possible change in the status of the wolf from “strictly protected” to “protected” under the Bern Convention, which is signed by 50 countries. The change would allow the species to be hunted.
The next meeting of the Bern Convention committee where any changes to wildlife protections could be agreed is in December.
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