When a wild bear attack led to the death of a 19-year-old hiker in Romania last week, the episode terrified people across the country and inspired a storm of horrified tabloid headlines.
So almost immediately, lawmakers in Romania — which is home to two-thirds of Europe’s wild brown bears and has long been a favored destination for hunters of big game — seized on the outcry to push for a broader cull.
Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu called lawmakers back from summer recess for a snap parliamentary session on bear attacks. And on Monday, they voted to more than double the number of brown bears that can be legally killed in Romania, raising the annual kill quota to 481, from 220.
Barna Tanczos, a senator who previously served as Romania’s environment minister and has long pushed for a broader cull, said of the move, “There is no other viable alternative besides issuing prevention and intervention quotas for brown bears.”
But some experts argue that the measure, if the country’s president signs it into law, will not get to the root of the problem, because it would not meaningfully reduce the amount of human-bear encounters.
“It will not prevent cases like this from happening again in the future,” Csaba Domokos, a bear biologist who works with the Milvus Group, a conservation organization in Romania, said in a telephone interview. Instead, he advised a change in behavior toward bears, noting that some people had even fed the animals by hand for selfies.
Brown bears are a protected species in Europe, and Romania tightly restricts hunting of the animals. From 2004 to 2021, there were 240 bear attacks on people in the country, according to environment ministry, and 22 people died.
Although lawmakers said they had no choice but to act to control what they described as overpopulation, there is even disagreement over how many brown bears there are in Romania, a country roughly the size of Michigan.
The environment ministry estimates that Romania had about 6,400 to 7,200 bears in 2019, an increase from the approximately 6,000 to 6,600 six years earlier. Yet some bear experts say that there has not been a recent reliable count, and that there is insufficient data to support any arguments that the country’s bear population is growing out of control.
“I don’t know if this is increasing — or if it has become really more visible,” Mr. Domokos said, citing images of a maimed body that were widely shared on social media after last week’s fatal attack.
Bear alerts and such widely shared videos have made people hypervigilant, said Barbara Promberger-Fuerpass, an executive director of the Carpathia Conservation Foundation, a philanthropic organization that seeks to protect the Carpathian Mountains, where many bears roam.
“It’s the perception that is out of control,” she said.
The hiker who died last week, a Romanian woman, was in the Bucegi Mountains, which are part of the Southern Carpathians, according to Sergiu Frusinoiu, a team leader at Salvamont Prahova, a mountain rescue organization.
The organization said in a Facebook message that she was with a friend “on a very popular trail, maybe the most popular in Romania” when she encountered the bear. The hiker suffered “serious wounds before she fell in a canyon,” Mr. Frusinoiu said.
The organization also said that bear encounters were not rare, with at least one call a day in the area. Fatal attacks used to be more common, it said, but these days most of the calls came from farmers.
Some conservationists say that the number of bears and the way that bears have learned to behave toward humans are different things.
Bears in the wild usually keep to themselves, experts say, whereas the bears that are likely to cause repeated issues for humans are “habituated” to people, and drawn to settlements by easy access to food, like garbage.
In the case of last week’s fatality, the bear that attacked the hiker was “regularly fed by other tourists — so it had completely lost its fear of people,” Mr. Domokos said.
It is the wild bears that are coveted by hunters, who want to track through the country’s thick, mysterious forests, conservationists say.
“Trophy hunting will not help anything in respect to the problem bears,” said Christoph Promberger, who is also an executive of the Carpathia Conservation Foundation. “There’s no hunter that wants to stay around the village and shoot a small or medium-sized bear that is trying to break into a stable.”
Other deterrents — like electric fences and sheep dogs for agricultural areas — have been found to be ineffective, said Ovidiu Ionescu, a professor of wildlife management at Transylvania University of Brasov. Aggressive male bears have driven female bears and their cubs toward agricultural land, he said, and that has caused millions of dollars in damage in the last decade.
A cull, Professor Ionescu said, might be the most humane “compromise.”
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