Is this bear’s terrifying rampage through a mountain village proof that laws to protect the animals have gone too far?
PRACTICAL jokes are a speciality for 13-year-old Oliver Biskupic. So when he shouted, ‘Dad, watch out – a bear!’ as they cycled together last Sunday, his father Filip ignored him. His reaction was understandable. After all, the pair were pedalling along a busy towpath in the centre of Liptovsky Mikulas, and though brown bears are often seen in the surrounding forests, they had never been known to stray into this scenic Slovakian town, framed by the snow-capped Tatra mountains.
Seconds after his son’s warning, however, the transport manager realised it had been in deadly earnest. Hit from behind with the force of a tank, Mr Biskupic was thrown from his bike, landing on his back. When he looked up in a daze, the 16-stone bear loomed over him.
As Oliver watched in distress, the young male bear began to bite and scratch at his father with his knife-sharp claws. ‘My instinct was to cover my face and neck with my hands and kick up as hard as I could,’ said Mr Biskupic.
Underplaying his horrific mauling, he adds: ‘We had a small fight, or so my son tells me. As the bear went for me, I could hear him breathing big, deep gulps. His power was incredible. Luckily, I’m pretty tall and strong (he is 6ft 3in and almost 16 stone) and I do a lot of sports, so I think that helped me to survive.’
Though the onslaught lasted only 30 seconds, it seemed an eternity. As he was being savaged, passers-by filmed with their mobile phones but no one came to his aid. ‘Not that they could have done much,’ he shrugs.
He isn’t sure why it ended but thinks the bear might have been warded off by one of his kicks, which sprained his ankle. He was also left with deep puncture wounds to his ribcage and buttocks which, as he showed me, are now surrounded by purplish bruises.
As blood seemed to be streaming from his left eye, his immediate fear was that he had been blinded. Much to his relief, doctors later found the cut to be just above his eyebrow.
He doesn’t blame the bear. He assumes it was lost and he got in its way as it ran through the town ‘in panic’ and attacked him out of fear. Taken to hospital by the police, who had belatedly arrived on the scene, he learned that he wasn’t the bear’s only victim that afternoon.
ALSO being treated for nasty wounds and shock were four other locals: two middle-aged women, a girl of 10 and a man of 72, who had been bitten while trying to escape from the animal by climbing a fence.
As shown by the startling videos, which went viral this week, they had been attacked as the bear bounded past houses, a shopping precinct, two schools and a kindergarten (bizarrely appearing to use the pedestrian crossing as it veered across a main road).
Pushing her three-month-old daughter Ema in a buggy, Dasa Deveckova told me she looked up to find the bear a few yards in front of them. Her impulse was to run. Remembering advice that she had read, though, she saved herself and her baby by continuing to walk at a steady pace and in the same direction.
The bear looked at them curiously, then ignored them. But one shudders to imagine how many more might have been injured or killed had this been a weekday.
For in spring, when the weather is crisp and clear in the Tatras, skiers and hikers throng quaint streets and café terraces and pupils are often taught outside.
Also, this 20-minute rampage came two days after a 31-year-old Belarusian walker had been killed in an encounter with another bear, fewer than 10 miles away in the mountains. As her body was found at the bottom of a ravine, she is thought to have fallen to her death while being chased. Her 29-yearold boyfriend, who ran in another direction, survived. These dramas have forced urgent action, coming at a time when brown bear attacks are rising exponentially – from 2000 to 2015 there were 19 deaths caused by the bears in Europe, while in the next five years there were 11 in Romania alone.
As I arrived here on Thursday, the state nature protection organisation was finalising emergency measures to safeguard people in 19 of Slovakia’s 72 departments where bears are most prevalent.
Villagers whose houses border the forests were advised to stay indoors in the early morning and evening, when these furtive creatures are most active.
Meanwhile, trackers and hunters armed with shotguns, thermal imaging equipment, and drones with new software designed to distinguish individual bears, were combing the woods for the bear that brought terror to town. Though a council official assured me on Tuesday that the rogue bear had been cornered and would have been ‘eliminated’ by the time I reached Liptovsky Mikulas, by Friday it was still on the loose.
In two hamlets near the area where it is thought to be hiding, the lanes and playparks were deserted. Doors and were locked and windows, too. Even the upstairs ones, for brown bears can not only run at 30mph, they climb as nimbly as steeplejacks.
However, the ramifications of this drama reach far beyond this mountain outpost. This is a story with huge ideological overtones.
It goes to the heart of the bitter clash between landowners and hunters, backed by right-wing politicians who believe it is time to cull Europe’s burgeoning brown bears, and doctrinaire eco-warriors supported by the liberal Left who demand that bears must be allowed to breed unchecked, no matter the cost to humans.
In Slovakia the row couldn’t have come at a more crucial time. Yesterday, first round voting took place in the presidential election and though the 5.5 million citizens may have other more pressing problems, since almost half the country is thickly forested the management of its bear population is always a key issue.
Environment minister Tomas Taraba, a member of the rightwing Slovak National Party, was quick to make political capital out of last Sunday’s spate of attacks.
He blamed the ‘tragic’ events squarely on the animal rights brigade who, he said, naively
My instinct was to cover my face, his power was incredible