3d ago

Slovakia backs plan to shoot 350 bears after man killed in attack

www.bbc.com

The Slovak cabinet has approved a plan to shoot around a quarter of the country's brown bears, after a man was mauled to death while walking in a forest in Central Slovakia.

Prime Minister Robert Fico's populist-nationalist government announced after a cabinet meeting that 350 out of an estimated population of 1,300 brown bears would be culled, citing the danger to humans after a spate of attacks.

"We can't live in a country where people are afraid to go into the woods," the prime minister told reporters afterwards.

3 comments

Kinda seems like an 1840's solution to the problem
- I think people were much less afraid of bears back then. Also they were reasonable enough to conclude that a single human death by a bear was did not warrant the extirpation of all local bears.
  And now the comment that got me a 3 day ban on Reddit: If people can't live with animals, they will go extinct.

Yet another case experts saying X and the government doing Y.
"Environment Minister Tomas Taraba said on Wednesday there were more than 1,300 bears in Slovakia, and that 800 was a "sufficient number", as the population was growing.
However, experts say the population remains more or less stable at around 1,270 animals."