The central European country of Slovakia has weathered a spate of bear attacks in recent weeks, including one that killed a 31-year-old woman and another that left five people injured in the middle of a populated urban area. In response to these incidents, Slovakia’s environmental minister wants to ease protections on the country’s brown bears—allowing hunters and response team members more leeway in shooting and killing bears deemed responsible for attacks on humans.
The most recent attack occurred on March 17. That’s when a brown bear entered the town Liptovský Mikuláš from the nearby Tatras Mountains, a post on the town’s Facebook page states. It attacked pedestrians—including a 10-year-old girl—along a four-lane road and then swam across a river before “security forces pushed [it] into the forest.”
The Tatras Mountains are part of the Carpathian Range. The region is home to a National Park that straddles the border of Slovakia and Poland. Two days before the in-town attack that injured five, a different brown bear approached a 29-year-old man and a 31-year-old woman in the Tetras Mountains. Both of those people were visiting Slovakia from nearby Belarus, officials said.
According to a press release issued by Slovakia’s Mountain Rescue Service, the bear chased the woman off a steep cliff. The rescue crew later spotted the bear near the woman at the bottom of the cliff before scaring it away with warning shots. They managed to located her companion, who was uninjured, but the woman was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to the BBC, brown bear populations in the Carpathian Mountains have rebounded significantly since 1989, when the fall of communism brought about stricter environmental controls across central and eastern Europe. Local researchers say that Slovakia’s is now home to more than 1,200 individual brown bears.
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Last Wednesday, Slovakian Environmental Minister Tomas Taraba said the bear that attacked five in Liptovský Mikuláš has since been killed, but members of an opposing political party claim that Taraba’s environmental officials killed the wrong bear, the BBC reports. In response to the recent attacks, Taraba says he’ll petition the European Union to “allow hunters, conservationists, police officers and national park administrators to shoot any bear that comes within 500 meters of a residence, village or city.”
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