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Konstantin and Tatiana were attacked by the bear around 5pm on March 15, when the light was rapidly fading. The young couple, aged 29 and 31, identified only by their first names in local media reports, were Belarusians living in Poland. However, during the winter, Konstantin worked as a ski instructor in the popular resort town of Jasna in neighboring Slovakia. The winter season was coming to an end, and on his day off, he and his girlfriend decided to go hiking beneath the 4,718-foot Na Djame mountain in the Slovak National Park surrounding the resort.
It’s not clear exactly what happened next, but newspaper reports say the couple ran in separate directions when they encountered a young male bear weighing about 265 pounds. Konstantin, now alone, tries to call Tatiana. When he received no response, he called mountain rescue. It was nightfall when Tatiana’s body was finally found with the help of a search dog. She apparently fell into a ravine and suffered a fatal wound to her head.
Like previous bear deaths in Slovakia and across Europe, this incident prompted accusations that conservationists were protecting bears at the expense of human safety. In 2021, a 57-year-old man was attacked and killed by a bear in the same national park, sparking tensions in the community over the bear’s presence and calls for its culling. But as it stands, hunting the animals is prohibited by both Slovak and European law, and experts are vocal that a lack of education, rather than a focus on conservation, is the main cause of the problem. are doing.
“This is where the unwarranted statements from the media and politicians really started,” said Robin Rigg, a British-born zoologist. Rigg, an expert on large carnivores, moved to Slovakia in 1998, two years after he became president of the Slovak Wildlife Association. Initial reports suggested Tatiana may have been killed by the bear itself rather than the fall, Rigg said. “And it’s been said publicly, actually by someone from the Ministry of the Environment, that it was a predatory attack. But we don’t see any evidence of that.”
The animal was near the body when rescuers found Tatiana, but “that doesn’t mean the bear was trying to kill and eat her,” Rigg said. He stressed that his conclusions were preliminary because he had not seen all the evidence. But he has seen some of the gruesome photos leaked to the media and “none of them showed any signs of being consumed.” The puncture marks found on the young woman’s legs “look like claw marks, but they are not signs of feeding,” he said.
“Predatory attacks in Europe are extremely rare and not common anywhere else in the world,” Riggs said. The incident occurred in an area where bears are known to hibernate, just as bears are waking up. “And what can sometimes happen is that the bear reacts aggressively to protect itself. I think that’s what most likely happened in this case. Two people. “They were surprised that someone showed up,” Rigg said.
Unfortunately, this type of nuance is not often covered in news coverage of bear attacks. “In fact, statistically, you’re more likely to have an allergic reaction to being struck by lightning or being stung by a bee,” Rigg says. And nails. It goes back to an instinctive fear that has existed in us since prehistoric times. ”
Claims that Slovakia’s bears are nothing to be feared were further undermined when footage of the animals scampering through Liptovski Mikulás’s high street was released just two days after Tatiana’s death. The animal was filmed charging towards pedestrians, who then jumped over a fence and fled. No one was seriously injured, but the video went viral. “And now,” Rigg says. “These two incidents occurred within 48 hours of each other and within a few kilometers of each other. So you tend to look at them together and ask, ‘What should we do about bears?’ .”
This issue has become increasingly pressing in recent years, not only in Slovakia but throughout Europe. The brown bear has been hunted to the brink of extinction in many countries, and in 1992 he was granted “strictly protected” status under EU law. In most areas where brown bears exist, bear populations are increasing, with an estimated 17,000 bears today. Bears live in rural areas across the continent. The recovery of this keystone species is being hailed as a major victory by biologists and biodiversity experts, but it is not without its challenges.
In the Pyrenees Mountains, which straddle the border between France and Spain, French and Spanish farmers’ unions are calling for bear numbers to be reduced, fed up with damage to crops, beehives and livestock. In the northern Italian region of Trentino, where bears were reintroduced as part of an EU-funded rewilding project, resentment simmered over the tragic death of trail runner Andrea Papi in April 2023. rose to the surface. To the surprise of local scientists, Trentino’s right-wing populist president, Maurizio Fugatti, proposed killing half of the roughly 120 carefully cared for bears overnight.
But experts say culling bears is far from the best way to prevent future tragedies. In the wake of Andrea Papi’s death, the local natural history museum invited Tom Smith, a bear management expert from Brigham Young University in Utah, to discuss how such issues are being handled in North America. I gave a lecture. In a sign of how tensions in the community are running high, the museum took the unusual step of posting armed guards at the entrance.
Smith suggested in his talk that the solution is relatively simple: “What we have here is not necessarily a bear problem, but a human problem.” Unlike in North America, where people in bear habitat have grown up with bears, Europeans living near areas where populations have recently recovered don’t necessarily know how to behave. But basic bear awareness training, like the kind taught “in kindergarten” in some Canadian provinces, could significantly reduce the number of dangerous and fatal encounters. be.
Mr. Smith runs the North American Human Bear Conflict Database. The database contains detailed information on 2,175 historical attacks and contains “250,000 data points.” “What we’ve learned from studying these events is that 60 percent of them are completely unnecessary and could have been avoided if people had acted differently,” he told the audience. told. In an interview a few days later, Smith spoke specifically about Papi’s death, telling WIRED: Let me tell you, this was completely preventable. ”
Sadly, this appears to have been the case in Slovakia as well. “Unfortunately, the route they chose was extremely dangerous,” Rigg said. “They shouldn’t have been there because it’s not a certified hiking route and it’s part of a highly protected park. Plus, it’s a limestone area and we would expect Denning bears to live there. The encounter occurred around dusk, when crepuscular creatures like brown bears tend to be more active.
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