Romania to take bear census

ROME • Romania is to deploy hundreds of DNA experts in an ambitious plan to count its bear population, the largest in Europe, after a rise in attacks on people.

Officials estimate that there are 6,000 bears in the Eastern European country but hunters claim there could be double that number.

To establish the exact figure, 400 experts and volunteers will fan out across mountains and forests, taking samples of droppings and hair for DNA analysis.

The census is expected to provide more reliable results than previous efforts which relied on counting tracks left in snow and mud.

Conservationists say the problem is not the number of bears but the fact that many of the animals associate towns and villages with easy sources of food.

The groups worry that if the census shows that the bear population is greater than 6,000, it will strengthen the hunting lobby's argument that more bears should be culled.

Trophy hunting of bears in Romania has been banned since 2016 but environmentalists say that a loophole, through which “problem” bears can be shot, is being abused.

The issue came to worldwide attention earlier this year when a prince from Liechtenstein was issued with a permit to shoot a “nuisance” female bear but instead killed a male bear called Arthur, believed to be the largest in Romania and probably in the EU.

Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein shot the bear during a hunting expedition in the Carpathians in March.

There have been around 100 attacks by bears on humans in Romania in the past three years. Last month, a bear killed one shepherd and seriously injured another in Transylvania. “The situation has become untenable,” Marton-csaba Bacs, the mayor of Bixad village in central Romania, told Agence Francepresse.

“Every day, bears ransack orchards and attack sheep. They even entered the courtyard of the clinic. The villagers are frightened.”

Cristian Papp, from WWF Romania, said it was human behaviour that had created nuisance bears. “The problem is not too many bears but the fact that we have more and more bears that are accustomed to the presence of humans and associate humans with food availability,” he said.

Hunters consistently overestimated the number of bears, he added. “They may say, `well in my area there are 60 bears,' but bears move around a lot.

“We had one bear with a tracking collar which crossed 80 hunting management units in one month, so in theory it could have been counted 80 times.”