A plan to cull a bear in an Italian state has angered environmentalists who say it threatens the bear’s existence.
The province of Trentino in northern Italy has announced it will cull eight bears this year after a series of attacks on people.
“We want to put a stop to the growth of the bear population in order to ensure people’s safety,” said Roberto Filoni, the Trentino government’s forestry lawmaker.
But Michela Brambilla, president of Italy’s Interparliamentary Group for Animal Rights, said the move was a “terrorist” attack on bears that could be avoided with more environmental considerations.
Brambilla told Italian daily Corriere della Sera that the state should do more to educate locals and tourists on how to behave safely in the mountains.
“For example, just putting up a sign warning tourists would have been enough.” [on the danger of bears] Set up trash cans to prevent bears from eating trash left in the forest. Instead, they only have a culling plan in mind,” she said.
The incident sparked a long-standing debate about how to manage local bear populations while keeping people in the mountains safe.
In July, a judge at the Council of State in Rome ruled against a culling order for two bears in northern Italy.
One of the bears, known as JJ4, killed jogger Andrea Papi in the Brenta Dolomites in the Alps. Another bear, known as MJ5, had attacked hikers in the same area several weeks earlier.
The judges ruled that brown bears are protected under the 1979 Bern Convention on Wild Animals and that “culling should be the last resort” to control the population.
The Italian arm of the World Wildlife Fund said that “cases of extremely dangerous bears are extremely rare and unpredictable.” It is impossible to determine annual culling quotas as the new plan predicts, so each case must be carefully evaluated. ”