How a deadly bear attack in Slovakia triggered a massive cull

When Ján failed to return from his usual Sunday evening walk on March 30, fears for the 59-year-old’s safety grew and a search operation was launched.

More than 40 people, including firefighters and loved ones, fanned out into the woods, and two hours later, in the shadow of Kochlačka mountain near the Slovakian town of Detva, Ján’s wounded and lifeless body was found.

His final Sunday stroll had ended in terror: he was mauled by a brown bear.

News that the former factory worker and nature lover had been killed by a bear spread fast. One elderly woman who knew Ján was in tears when interviewed by local media. She described him as a good guy, who loved beekeeping and was on a disability pension. “He didn’t deserve such a death,” she told Pravda, a Slovakian newspaper.

But there was also fury on the streets of Detva, home to about 13,000 people. With Slovakia’s bear population having risen sharply over the past century, some said it was a tragedy waiting to happen, and one that could be avoided.

“Do they still think in [the capital] Bratislava that we don’t have enough bears? We’ll put some of them to sleep here and bring them there, so they can experience life in stress and fear for their lives,” one young man told the newspaper. “I don’t think there’s a person here who hasn’t had the experience of meeting a bear.”

In Bratislava, Robert Fico, the prime minister, was listening. The Left-wing nationalist promptly ordered a cull of a quarter of Slovakia’s brown bears and declared an emergency in two thirds of the country. Slovaks “cannot live in a country where people are afraid to go into the forest and where humans become food for bears”, he said.

“There is a real concern that the summer could be exceptionally bad in terms of attacks by this beast,” Mr Fico said, referring to the particular dangerous time of year after bears have awoken from hibernation.

Ján was by no means the first bear victim in Slovakia. Just last year, two people died after being attacked or chased by bears.

In March last year, a bear ran amok, injuring five, as it bounded through the streets of the town Liptovský Mikuláš in broad daylight. Footage of the rampage went viral and the bear was hunted down with the help of drones 10 days later and killed.

The European brown bear was almost hunted to extinction in Slovakia in the 1930s. Just 20 to 60 of them remained when the population was at its lowest.

Now, thanks in part to EU wildlife conservation laws, the population has made an astonishing comeback. But that has also meant a rise in encounters between humans and bears.

In 2020, there were 650 such encounters, according to Slovakia’s populist government. That figure rose to an estimated 1,900 in 2024.

This month, the government approved a plan, currently under review in Brussels, to kill 350 of the estimated 1,300 brown bears in the country.

The issue has infuriated conservationists, who accuse Mr Fico of trampling over EU rules to score political points by declaring the emergency cull, which makes it easier to issue permits to hunters.

Last year, 144 bears were killed in Slovakia. Ninety-four of them were culled, the most in Slovakia’s history, in a vote-winning hunt declared shortly before the country’s presidential elections.

Mr Fico had vowed to shoot more bears before the pro-Moscow politician and his Smer party won the general election in October 2023, ousting the previous progressive and pro-EU government.

Environmental campaigners argue the country should use preventative measures instead, and focus on problem bears rather than a general cull, which has not prevented deaths in the past.

“The current government, which is aligned with the hunting community, favours population control through culling whereas the previous government, which favoured environmentalists’ views, perhaps at times was too reluctant to take necessary action,” said Robin Rigg, of the Slovak Wildlife Society.

“Where bears and people share landscapes, it may not be possible to eliminate attacks entirely. However, the likelihood of injury can be reduced through knowing how to avoid, or respond appropriately to, encounters with bears,” he added.

“Before considering culling, we should ensure that preventative measures are in place as well as education campaigns on how people should behave in areas around bear habitats,” said Léa Badoz, wild animals programme officer for Eurogroup for Animals.

“This is just a hysterical reaction to the tragedy on Sunday night,” Pavol Žilinčík, a lawyer and policy manager at World Wildlife Foundation Slovakia, said.

“The government simplifies things by thinking ‘there are too many bears so let’s kill some’. But the solution should be introducing measures that reduce bear encounters.”

He also blamed hunters for leaving bait out for deer, which can attract bears closer to humans.

But Branislav Baran, the mayor of Detva, insisted precautions were being taken.

He said there was not a single unsecured rubbish dump in the town, which he said was lit up “like Las Vegas” every night to make people feel safer and help deter bears.

“The atmosphere is not good. It is not helped by the statements of various pseudo-conservationists and NGOs, saying that the blame is always being sought elsewhere. They do not want to see that human life should be above animal life,” he told Pravda.

‘Follow policies of Romania’

Tomáš Taraba, the Slovak environment minister, argued Bratislava was merely following the lead of Romania, which is home to Europe’s largest bear population.

“I am convinced that, just as they introduced it in Romania, we will also introduce a preventative quota for the shooting of bears in Slovakia,” Mr Taraba said on social media.

This was how the problem was regulated in the past “until the situation was worsened by environmental activism”, he added.

There are an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 brown bears in Romania, which doubled its annual cull to almost 500 last year after a 19-year-old tourist was killed.

On March 30, the very day Ján took his final walk, a mountain rescuer was seriously injured by a female bear, who was with two cubs.

He was walking home from work in the Romanian town of Predeal in the region of Brasov in Transylvania.

Over the past 20 years, bears have killed 26 people and seriously injured 274 others in the country. Romania’s environment minister has suggested the numbers of bears that can be legally shot should be increased in response.

But under the EU’s Habitats Directive, the brown bear is a strictly protected species, which means killing is only allowed as a last resort in exceptional circumstances.

The European Commission is scrutinising Slovakia’s emergency plan, the EurActiv website reported.

The EU has previously sought to tackle the issue through less radical measures, such as improving waste management and installing electric fences on rural properties. But Bucharest has successfully lobbied Brussels in the past to increase the number of bears that can be legally killed. And the EU has recently shifted from its previously ironclad commitment to its conservation laws.

Last year, the commission downgraded EU protections from the wolf from “strictly protected” to “protected”, allowing them to be hunted in greater numbers.

This was after European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s favourite horse, Dolly, was killed by a wolf in September 2022 at her home in Germany.

Her decision to push for weaker protections came after farmers complained of resurgent wolves targeting their livestock.

‘Conservation could be destroyed by ideology’

The issue of large carnivores such as wolves and bears became a totemic issue for conservative parties ahead of last year’s European Parliament elections. There was a backlash against EU green rules seen as too burdensome to bear during a cost of living crisis.

Brussels watered down or shelved some of its planned new laws in response to farmers’ protests before a vote where green parties performed notably badly.

Conservationists are not happy. “We are clearly seeing a ‘war on nature’ being waged in the EU,” said Ariel Brunner, head of EU policy at BirdLife International.

“Slovakia is a case in point where lies, scaremongering and fake solutions fit in a wider democratic roll-back,” he said, referring to EU concerns over the rule of law and press freedom in the country.

“Almost 20,000 people get killed by cars in the EU every year. Bear fatalities are in the single digits across Europe. The mass slaughter of bears has no justification whatsoever.”

He added: “We are very worried that decades of successful conservation work could be destroyed by ideological decisions.”