Plan the Slovakia back to shoot 350 bears after the man was killed in the attack

The Slovak cabinet has agreed to shoot a quarter of the country’s brown bears after a man had been driven to death while walking in a forest in Centralovakia.

After a cabinet meeting, the populist-nationalist government of Prime Minister Robert Fico announced that 350 would be eliminated by an estimated population of 1,300 brown bears, citing a series of attacks.

“We cannot live in a country where people are afraid of going into the forest,” the prime minister told reporters afterwards.

A special state of emergency in which bears can be shot has now been widened to 55 of the 79 districts of Slovakia, an area that now covers most of the country.

The government in Bratislava has already loosened legal protective measures, which allows bears to be killed if they come too close to human dwelling. Around 93 had been shot until the end of 2024.

The plans to shoot even more were convicted by conservationists who said that the decision could violate international obligations and be illegal.

“It’s absurd,” said Michal Wiezek, an ecologist and MP for the progressive of the opposition party.

“The Ministry of the Environment did not fail desperately to limit the number of bear attacks by the unprecedented club of these protected species,” he told the BBC.

“In order to cover up her failure, the government decided to chase even more bears,” he continued.

Wiezek argued that thousands of encounters passed without incidents and he hoped that the European Commission would intervene.

The Slovak police confirmed on Wednesday that a man in the forest near the city of Detva was killed by a bear on Sunday evening. His wounds agreed with an attack.

The 59-year-old man was reported missing on Saturday after not returning from a walk in the forest.

He was found with what the authorities described as “devastating injuries to the head”. The detection of the cave of a bear was found nearby, said a local NGO, said the Slovak newspaper Novy Cas.

Bears have become a political problem in Slovakia after an increasing number of encounters, including fatal attacks.

In March 2024, a 31-year-old Belarusian woman fell into a gorge and died while he was persecuted by a bear in northern Slovakia.

A few weeks later, a large brown bear was recorded on video, which ran on the bright daylight through the middle of the nearby city of Liptovsky Mikolas to pull past cars and fell on people on the sidewalk.

The authorities later stated that they had chased and killed the animal, although conservationists later gave clear evidence that they had shot another bear.

Environment Minister Tomas Taraba said on Wednesday that there were more than 1,300 bears in Slovakia, and 800 were a “sufficient number” than the population grew.

However, experts say that the population remains more or less stable in around 1,270 animals.

Bears are common in the entire Carpathian Mountains, which extends in an arc from Romania via western Ukraine to Slovakia and Poland.