Italy’s environment minister has condemned the killing of a brown bear that attacked a tourist in the Dolomites earlier this month in defence of its cubs.
The controversial order for the bear to be captured and killed was signed by Maurizio Fugatti, the governor of Trentino, a semi-autonomous province in the mountainous north of the country.
The culling of the female bear, carried out by rangers overnight, caused a furore on Tuesday, with the decision condemned by politicians, conservationists and animal rights groups.
Environmental groups said they were deeply concerned about whether the three cubs would survive now that their mother had been killed.
“I had already told Fugatti, the killing of individual bears is not the solution to the problem,” said the environment minister, Gilberto Picchetto Fratin. He said it would be better to tackle the issue by sterilising female bears which were considered a potential threat to humans.
Earlier this month, a 43-year-old French tourist who had gone for an early morning run near the village of Dro in the Trentino region surprised the female bear with her three cubs. The bear attacked him, leaving him with injuries to his arms and legs.
He managed to raise the alarm and was taken to hospital for treatment.
Ever since the attack happened on July 16, Mr Fugatti had been determined to have the bear killed, saying it had become dangerous and overly habituated to inhabited areas.
However, environmentalists said that the bear, known as KJ1, had instinctively tried to protect its cubs and that any attempt to cull it would result in a huge overreaction.
‘Italy’s shame’
They said the governor signed the decree to capture and kill the bear at 9pm on Monday to avoid any legal challenges being presented by animal rights campaigners.
“He did it at night when the courts could not intervene,” said Michela Vittoria Brambilla, a former government minister and now the head of a parliamentary group on animal rights.
“He signed the order at 9.35pm… decreeing that the bear must die, no ifs and no buts. Instead of dispatching rangers to close hiking trails and dissuade walkers from the area, he sent them to kill a 22-year-old bear which for two-thirds of its life had done nothing to cause any trouble and which was simply defending its cubs.”
She accused the governor of arrogance and “authoritarianism”.
In a post on Facebook, the governor said he had issued the decree because KJ1 had become dangerous to humans. He said there had been an urgent need to “remove” the bear from the wild as soon as possible.
Several mayors in the region had also called for the bear to be killed, with one saying that she no longer ventured into the mountains on her own because she deemed it too dangerous.
A few days after the attack on the French runner, a Swiss woman and her three children encountered a large bear and a cub on the shores of Lake Molveno, a local beauty spot surrounded by forest and towering limestone peaks. The female bear and her cub quickly vanished into the forest.
On social media, Mr Fugatti’s decision to have the bear culled was met with anger and sadness by many Italians. “Shameful”, and “Italy’s shame”, many wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“Congratulations for killing an innocent animal,” one Italian woman wrote, while a man named Marco called the governor “an assassin”. Another sarcastically hailed him as “a hero”. He was also described as “a bloody butcher”.
Brown bears were reintroduced to the Dolomites from neighbouring Slovenia in the 1990s, with the project proving a conservation success story.
There are now an estimated 100 brown bears roaming the forests and mountains of the Dolomites, the range that dominates the north-east of Italy.
In April last year, an Italian runner was killed by a bear that he encountered in the forests of Trentino, in what was the first fatality in living memory. Andrea Papi died after being mauled on a trail above the town of Caldes in the Brenta Dolomites.
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