A bear killed a teenager. Will a cull solve Romania’s bear problem?

On July 9, Diana Cazacu, a 19-year-old hiker, was killed by a young female bear in the Bucegi Mountains, north of Bucharest. In response, the government lifted a 2016 moratorium on bear hunting, reigniting a fierce debate over what to do with Romania’s growing bear population, the largest in Europe after Russia.

The staff at the headquarters of Salvamont, the Romanian mountain rescue service, exudes calm and efficiency.

When Diana and her boyfriend called the emergency number, 112, in a panic at 3pm on 9 July, the call was transferred here.

Sergiu Frusinoiu, who was in charge of the incident that day, immediately set off with two teams. One approached the scene from above, the other from below. Bears rarely attack humans, except in self-defense, so Sergiu assumed that this would be a simple rescue mission.

At the scene, they found the woman’s boyfriend, in distress. The bear had grabbed Diana and thrown her into the ravine. They climbed down using a rope and found the bear standing over the victim.

The bear attacked the rescue team, who defended themselves with tear gas, firecrackers and rocks, until a hunter arrived and shot the bear. It was too late for Diana, who lay face down with her head in the creek.

“Even if the fall or her injuries didn’t kill her, the water could have,” Sergiu told me.

Diana’s mistake, he said, was running away from the bear. Sergiu grew up in these mountains and has had hundreds of encounters with bears, without incident, he said.

The usual advice is to make noise in bear territory when walking. If you encounter a bear, stay quiet and still, then slowly back away. As with a dog, the worst thing you can do is run away, as it will definitely follow you.

At the foot of the trail Diana climbed that day, it’s clear why the bear was in the way. Three large municipal trash cans, the remains of a cage around one of them, are open to the sky. One has been knocked over, and rotting food, cans and plastic are scattered over a wide area.

Around 8,000 bears live in the Carpathian Mountains, one of Europe’s last remaining wildernesses, their habitat constantly being eroded by logging, urban expansion and tourism.

In the nearby town of Busteni, at seven in the evening, I receive a bear alert on my phone and rush to the scene, a residential street.

Angry residents say they are afraid to walk home at night because of bears.

The police arrive and the locals accuse them of not doing enough. “But what do you want us to do?” asks a young policeman. “Protect us!” shouts a man.

I manage to reach the hunter who shot the bear that killed Diana, but he says he won’t talk until the investigation is complete.

Former Environment Minister Barna Tanczos is the author of the new law, passed by the House of Deputies and approved by President Klaus Iohannis in July, which allows citizens to kill up to 500 bears over the next 18 months.

“The bear population is increasing every day, every month, every year in Romania, so if we do nothing, we will have thousands, tens of thousands of bears, which is not good for humans or for the bears,” Tanczos said.

“So we need to establish control, we need balance in the relationship between man and bear, in conflict and in contact.”

According to Cristi Remus Papp, head of the large carnivores department at the World Wildlife Fund, the new law will not improve the situation and could even make it worse.

He admits that there are a growing number of “troublesome” bears, but there are no precise statistics on their total number.

However, numbers are not the most important thing, he said: “We need to address the root causes of conflict, starting with the mass feeding of bears near homes and along roads in tourist areas.”

Since communist times, hunting associations have been required by law to feed bears – a practice initially intended to facilitate their hunting and keep them away from cities, but which is now partly practiced by tour operators, who want to guarantee bear sightings for their clients.

Social media is full of videos of tourists feeding bears from their cars. A change in the law could be to punish those who do this.

Other bear management methods have been tried with some success, such as tranquilizing bears or moving them to mountain wilderness areas. But now that bears have taken to scavenging through trash or begging for food, even conservationists say there may be no other solution than to shoot them.

The town of Baile Tusnad is an example of good practice.

“In 2021, we had 220 bear alerts. This year, so far, we’ve only had 3,” Mayor Zsolt Butyka told me proudly. His municipality has purchased 14 stainless steel bear-proof trash cans, cut down 50 fruit trees in the city, and held regular bear awareness campaigns.

A sign near the town hall reads: “If you feed a bear, you kill a bear.”

The town lies on a major bear migration route through the Olt Valley, but they now skirt its banks. “They’ve realised there’s nothing for them here,” the mayor tells me.

On a warm summer evening, Janos Szin, a tour operator who runs several bear shelters in the Tusnad region, sends me the coordinates of where I should wait. A ranger in a 4×4 comes to pick me up.

Once they are settled behind a large glass window in a raised hide, he takes out a bag and spreads corn. The bears arrive while he is still there – two females, one with three cubs. After a while, a large male approaches and the others scatter. He steps on the scale, disguised as a bird feeder, and we see his weight: 240 kg.

In a telephone conversation, Mr. Szin tells me that the law is bad.

The “bad bears” will be killed: the big males that go about their business in the mountains. These males help keep the population low, he said, because they kill the cubs so they can mate with their mothers.

This is a common practice among wild lions, but experts disagree on its prevalence in bears.

Another problem is poachers trying to steal cubs, Szin suggests.

He fears that hunters from all over the world will now gather in Romania, the only place where they can get a bear skin and a skull, to hang them on the walls.