Tthe forest was unnaturally quiet when Soňa Chovanová Supeková first caught the bear’s scent. It was roe deer rutting season in southern Slovakia, and the foothills below the Carpathian mountains were busy with tourists cycling and looking for mushrooms. Said fellow hunters who faced the bears Supeková was so afraid that they could not lift their rifles. Sitting with his father, a hunter in his 80s who had killed several bears, he found himself in a similar state of dread – he was out on that trip hoping to kill a deer, and he didn’t want to ride a bear unexpectedly.
“I was covered in fear … the smell penetrated to the end of my bones,” said Supeková, the founder of the Club of Slovak Lady Hunters. But the bear did not appear. The next morning, the daughter-and-father found the duo hunting. “We just breathed a sigh of relief in the car.”
Brown bears in Europe are a protected species. But they – along with wolves and lynxes – are increasingly crossing paths with farmers, forest officials and hunters like Supeková. The appetite for killing large carnivores has increased as wolf and bear populations have increased, numerous bear attacks have made headlines, and politicians have focused on laws that have brought them back from the brink of extinction.
Sweden has issued permits to kill 486 of its brown bears, about 20%, this hunting season, which runs until mid-October. In 2023, the country conducted record-breaking culls of lynxes and wolves. Romania’s MPs voted in July to double its hunting quota from 220 brown bears to 481. In Slovakia, where a bear was recently filmed moving through a village, lawmakers voted in June to allow hunting near villages under certain conditions. In July, the European court of justice ruled that recent wolf culls in Austria and Spain were illegal. Earlier in the year, Switzerland also faced legal challenges for its proposal to kill 70% of its wolf population.
The debate surrounding the shooting of protected species has sparked such outrage among farmers, hunters and conservationists that it has reached the highest levels of bureaucrats in Brussels. The European Commission, whose president, Ursula von der Leyen, had a pony killed by a wolf two years ago, is seeking to downgrade the animal’s protection status.
“The wolf is no longer an animal with two ears, four legs and a tail; it’s a political topic,” said Luigi Boitani, a zoologist at Sapienza University of Rome and chairman of the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe, a conservation group. “There is a lot of polarization. When you talk about wolves and bears, the world is not different shades of gray, it is black or white.”
Wolves were exterminated in much of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, but began to make a comeback in the 1970s as people moved from villages to cities, and governments eventually protected the animals and their residences. A similar change has occurred with brown bears and lynx, where conservationists have reintroduced them to regions where they were exterminated.
The continent is now home to six species of large carnivores, and the EU prohibits killing them, with some exceptions – for example if they pose a risk to the public. Standing at the top of their food chain, animals help ecosystems thrive by regulating prey populations. There is also some evidence that they can limit the spread of disease.
But the scale and speed of their return – there are thought to be more than 20,000 wolves and 17,000 bears in Europe – has increasingly led to conflicts with people. Farmer and hunting lobbies have pushed to reduce the number of barriers needed to kill them as the animals expand their territory and attack people and livestock.
A week after Supeková found the bear’s tracks in the forest, she said: “A farmer’s son met a bear on a forest road when he was picking mushrooms in an area only about 2km away. Fortunately, the bear escaped.”
Footage of a bear shooting through the streets of a small Slovakian town drew international attention in March, with five injured in the attack. Also the death of a Belarusian hiker who died fleeing from a bear the day before. The attacks prompted a change in the law to let Slovak security services shoot brown bears within half a kilometer of a human settlement. A few months later in Romania, the death of a 19-year-old hiker at the hands of a bear led the prime minister to call lawmakers back from their summer vacation for an emergency session in which they voted to take more bears.
People from villages and the countryside want to reduce the number of bears because attacks are increasing, Supeková said. “What is very sad is that a bear in the town of Liptovský Mikuláš injured five people, running across the town where children were outside playing.”
The issue has become fodder for populist parties courting rural votes, with politicians blasting Brussels for putting their children at risk and abandoning villages from elitist environmental concerns.
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Critics say the deaths are tragic but not on a large scale. In Romania, home to the most brown bears in Europe, the animals have killed 26 people and injured 276 in 20 years, according to the environmental ministry. Data from Eurostat shows that motor vehicles killed 45,000 people in the country during that period.
Cultural associations are a problem for the wolf, which has long been portrayed as the villain of fairytales. Helmut Dammann-Tamke, president of the German hunting association and politician with the center-right Christian Democrats, said the threat of wolf attacks on sheep was “like something on a serving platter” for the far right because it reached people on an emotional level. . “This issue is an incendiary force in the hands of the populists.”
A 2022 study of German municipalities found that wolf attacks on livestock predict far-right support. After controlling for factors such as immigration and jobs, the researchers found that wolf attacks were associated with far-right victories in municipal elections of between one and two percentage points. “Evidence points to wolf attacks as a potential driver of electoral radicalization,” the authors wrote.
Environmental activists question whether blanket policies on animal culls do much to prevent human conflicts and call for measures to promote peaceful coexistence that range from fences and guardrails dogs up to awareness campaigns for visitors.
Scientists are not yet concerned about wolf populations across the continent, but warn that killing wolves in countries with small populations could prove catastrophic. Large culls could put populations of these predators below local survival levels, they warn. Culls can further increase animal predation, as packs are disrupted, sending lone, vulnerable wolves venturing into farms to hunt. The same “backfire” effect has also been documented in cougars and coyotes.
Ciprian Gal from the Romanian branch of Greenpeace said the Europe-wide trend of waning protections for large carnivores is “a step backwards” that echoes a time when humans felt fierce competition with wildlife.
“European governments, influenced by the prevailing populist rhetoric and powerful hunting and agricultural lobbies, seem to be choosing solutions based on fear and rapid economic recovery,” he said. “In a way, this is a backlash against the ambitious green policies of recent years and a valve for those who are still struggling to cope with the climate reality we face.”
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