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

The Slovakian cabinet approved the plan to shoot one -quarter of the country’s brown bear after the man died while walking in the forest of Central Slovakia.

Prime Minister Robert Pico’s populist-nationalist government announced that after 350 of the 1,300 brown bears after the Cabinet meeting, they would be cursed by citing risks from humans after being attacked.

“We can’t live in a country where people are afraid of entering the forest,” the prime minister later told reporters.

A special emergency status that can fit the bear is now widened to 55 in 79 Slovakia, and is currently dealing with most countries.

Bratislava’s government has already solved the legal protection of killing bears when it is too close to human residence. About 93 were shot by the end of 2024.

More shootings were accused by conservatives, and this decision could violate international obligations and be illegal.

Michal Wiezek, an ecological and MEP of the opposition party’s progressive Slovakia, said, “It’s ridiculous.”

“The Ministry of Environment has desperately failed to limit the number of bear attacks by unprecedented curling of this protected species,” he told the BBC, “he told the BBC.

“In order to cover their failure, the government decided to draw more bears,” he continued.

Wiezek insisted that thousands of meetings were passed without an incident, and the European Commission hoped to intervene.

The Slovakia police confirmed that a man who died in the forest was killed by a bear near the village of Detva in central Slovakia on Wednesday night. His wounds matched the attack.

A 59 -year -old man is known to have disappeared on Saturday after failing to return from the walk in the forest.

He was found to have been described by the authorities as “a fatal injury to the head.” The evidence of the bear’s oysters was found nearby, the local NGO told the Slovakia newspaper.

Bears have become a political problem in Slovakia after the number increased, including fatal attacks.

In March 2024, a 31 -year -old Belarusian woman fell into the valley and was driven by a bear in northern Slovakia.

A few weeks later, a large brown bear was caught in a video that passed through the center of nearby villages with a wide sunlight.

The authorities later argued that they hunted and killed the animals, but conservatives said there was a clear evidence that they later shot another bear.

The Minister of Environment, Thomas Taraba, said on Wednesday that there were more than 1,300 bears in Slovakia, and 800 people increased as the population increased.

But experts say that the population remains somewhat stably in an animal of about 1,270.

Bears are common in Carpathian Mountain Range, and extend to arc from Romania to west Ukraine and Slovakia and Poland.