“If a bear attacks a human being once, experience shows that it will do it again. As soon as we find him, he will be killed immediately. » This Tuesday, March 26, it has been ten days since Jaroslav Slastan, head of the intervention teams against the brown bear in Slovakia, has been on the trail of the animal which injured five people in Liptovsky Mikulas on March 17. The images published that day on social networks by the panicked inhabitants of this small town at the foot of the Tatra mountains went around all of Europe. We see a panicked animal running in all directions between the houses.
“Local elected officials fear this will happen again”explains from the hall of the town hall this strong fellow in camouflage clothing, who took a few minutes of break to tell how his teams set out in pursuit of a “male weighing approximately 100 kilos”. “It’s like a race against time with a fugitive prisoner”, he compares, detailing in particular his array of night vision drones. The pressure is strong, because the subject has become ” policy “agrees the patrolman.
In this Central European country with some of the best preserved national parks on the continent, the long peaceful cohabitation with the bear has suddenly become tense since a fatal attack in 2021, the first in a hundred years. Since that year, the number of attacks has increased, with around twenty reports per year, each time relaunching what has become a real “bear war” deeply dividing the 5.5 million Slovaks. A few days before the Liptovsky Mikulas attack, a hiker died after falling into a ravine after fleeing a bear. Thursday April 4, still in the same region, a forest guard was attacked and had to fire warning shots to scare the beast.
The plantigrades even took part in the campaign for the second round of the Slovak presidential election, organized on Saturday April 6. The candidate supported by the populist and pro-Russian government coalition, Peter Pellegrini, announced on March 28 that he was in favor of having a bill presented by the Ministry of the Environment to authorize logging adopted as quickly as possible. of any bear “crossing a limit of 500 meters” around villages, a measure which could contradict European law which only authorizes the slaughter of this protected animal in cases of direct danger. Controlled since October 2023 by the Slovak National Party (SNS, far right), the ministry is asking Brussels to lower this level of protection, with the support of its Romanian and Finnish counterparts.
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