Slovakia’s backs plan to draw 350 bears after the man killed in attack

The Slovak cabinet approved a plan to draw approximately a quarter of the country’s brown bears, after a man was mutilated to death while walking in a forest in the center of Slovakia.

The nationalist populist government of Prime Minister Robert Fico announced after a meeting of the cabinet that 350 on an estimated population of 1,300 brown bears would be slaughtered, citing the danger for humans after a series of attacks.

“We cannot live in a country where people are afraid of going to the woods,” the Prime Minister told journalists afterwards.

A special emergency state allowing bears to be slaughtered has now been extended to 55 of the 79 districts of Slovakia, an area which now covers most of the country.

The Bratislava government has already loosened legal protections allowing bears to be killed if they move away too close to human housing. Some 93 had been killed at the end of 2024.

The plans to draw even more were sentenced by environmentalists, who declared that the decision was in violation of international obligations and could be illegal.

“It’s absurd,” said Michal Wiezek, an environmentalist and deputy deputy for the progressive Slovakia of the opposition party.

“The Ministry of the Environment has desperately failed to limit the number of bear attacks by the unprecedented slaughter of this protected species,” he told BBC.

“To hide their failure, the government has decided to shoot even more bear,” he continued.

Wiezek argued that thousands of meetings per year have passed without incident, and he hoped that the European Commission would intervene.

Slovak police confirmed on Wednesday that a man found dead in the forest near the city of Detva in the center of Slovakia on Sunday evening was killed by a bear. His injuries were consistent with an attack.

The 59 -year -old man had been missing on Saturday after failing to return from a walk in the woods.

He was found with what the authorities described as “devastating injuries to the head”. Evidence of a lean of bear has been found nearby, a local NGO told Novy, a local NGO, told Slovak.

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

In March 2024, a 31 -year -old Belarusian woman fell into a ravine and died while she was chased by a bear in northern Slovakia.

Several weeks later, a large brown bear was captured on video crossing the center of the neighboring town of Liptovsky Mikolas in broad daylight, delimiting cars and rushing on people on the sidewalk.

The authorities later claimed to have tracked down and killed the animal, although the environmentalists later said that there were clear evidence that they had shot another bear.

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

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

The bears are common in the carpathian mountain range, which extends to a arch of Romania in the west of Ukraine and Slovakia and Poland.