A 19-year-old was killed by a bear on a popular hiking trail in Romania, immediately triggering a debate over the country’s strict ban on hunting, which has seen the brown bear population soar in recent years.
Two people walking the Jepii Mici tourist trail in Bucegi, Romania were attacked by a young brown bear on Tuesday. Despite the best efforts of the pair to scare off the animal by making noise and waving their arms, as is best practice, the animal persisted in its attack and dragged away a 19-year-old woman by her leg.
Harrowingly, the pair had both called emergency services when the bear first started following them, so police call handlers heard the woman’s final moments of life, as she screamed and was thrown down a 120-meter deep ravine.
Mountain rescuers and police attempted to reach the woman before she died but, having abseiled down the side of the ravine, discovered her lifeless body being guarded over by the brown bear. Several attempts were made to recover her body, but the bear attacked the rescuers each time. Eventually a hunter was summoned and asked to shoot the “extremely aggressive” bear dead. Police have opened an investigation into the hunter they asked to shoot the bear on suspicion of poaching, but they say this is purely a formality and do not intend to prosecute.
Breitbart London understands the bear had been spotted and reported to police as worrying members of the public in the days leading up to the attack, but the police took no action because there is no mechanism in Romanian law to deal with nuisance bears until they actually injure or kill. The popular tourist trail has seen a large number of bear sightings this year, with 57 emergency services calls made before this attack.
Bear attacks are a growing issue in Romania, which banned hunting for sport under the ‘technocratic’ government of Eurocrat Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Cioloș in 2016. Romania’s present leftist Prime Minister made a show of announcing new unspecified measures to protect the public from bears in the wake of the killing of the teenager this week, but made clear all the same this would not include bringing back hunting.
Former Romanian Minister of the Environment Barna Tanczos accused the government of deliberately dragging their heels on the growing bear population problem, saying a law he drafted during the previous government remains ready to be passed, but that it has been ignored. Tanczos, a member of Romania’s sizable ethnic Hungarian minority said this “terrible tragedy” could easily have been avoided and accused the government of holding the lives of bears as higher than human life.
He said, reports Romanian state news service AGERPRES: “we ask ourselves how many more people have to die, how many more people have to be maimed, how many people have to go to the hospital following bear attacks and how long will it take for people’s lives to become more important for the entire Romanian Parliament than the life of a brown bear.”
On the specifics of the case, Tanczos continued: “we are not talking about an isolated area, we are not talking about an area where humans appear very rarely and there was a meeting, a human-bear contact in an extremely isolated area. We are talking about an area frequented by tourists, an area where perhaps hundreds passed every day”.
Typically, the issue of bear attacks is divided on party lines. During Tanczos’ time in government, he was accused by green NGOs of being a “hunter who dislikes bears”, and consequently not trustworthy on the issue.
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