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Romania has more than doubled the annual number of legal bear kills to control the population after another fatal attack on a member of the public.
The emergency parliamentary session followed the death last week of a 19-year-old hiker who was attacked by a bear on a popular trail in the Carpathian mountains in central Romania.
The teenager called emergency services as she was attacked by the bear. Her boyfriend told local search and rescue teams that they were being chased by a bear.
“She was terrified... you can tell, she was screaming: ‘The bear is getting closer and closer!’” Dan Banu, head of Salvamont Prahova, told local media
“Everything happened live, the 112 dispatcher was on the phone and the young man was shouting that they were being attacked by a bear and that he had taken the girl. It was something terrible! He told us that the bear grabbed the girl by one leg and was dragging her after he and, at some point, he didn’t see what he did with her. The bear dragged her from the path and threw her 120 meters into the valley,” Banu continued.
The European Union state has annual quotas to proactively control the size of the bear population and to remove animals that have become accustomed to entering cities in search of food.
In 2023, the quotas amounted to 220 annual bear kills. On Monday, lawmakers increased the number to 481 per year.
Romania has Europe’s largest population of brown bears outside Russia. The environment ministry estimates their number at up to 8,000, but the results of an EU-funded, DNA-based study have yet to be presented.
With hundreds of bear sightings each year, authorities are struggling to keep residents and tourists in mountain towns safe from the wild animals. Local media regularly report bear attacks on people and livestock.
The environment minister said in March that 26 people have been killed by bears in the last 20 years. Bears approaching cars on mountain roads seeking food or scavenging through trash cans are common occurrences.
Wildlife experts say the animals, dubbed “trash-bin bears”, will continue to scavenge in cities as urban sprawl eats into their habitat, climate change limits their food sources and as people feed them.
“Unfortunately, nobody knows the exact population of bears in Romania nor how many specimens the habitat can take,” said Foundation Conservation Carpathia, a private conservation group.
“The number of problem bears and the damages they cause fluctuates yearly and is not directly proportional to the rise in bear density.”
It added solutions must include prevention, including electric fences, better trash management and education of tourists and residents.
