Hiker’s Death Prompts Move to Allow Wider Bear Cull in Romania

When a wild bear attack led to the death of a 19-year-old hiker in Romania last week, the episode terrified people across the country and inspired a storm of horrified tabloid headlines.

So almost immediately, lawmakers in Romania — which is home to two-thirds of Europe’s wild brown bears and has long been a favored destination for hunters of big game — seized on the outcry to push for a broader cull.

Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu called lawmakers back from summer recess for a snap parliamentary session on bear attacks. And on Monday, they voted to more than double the number of brown bears that can be legally killed in Romania, raising the annual kill quota to 481, from 220.

Barna Tanczos, a senator who previously served as Romania’s environment minister and has long pushed for a broader cull, said of the move, “There is no other viable alternative besides issuing prevention and intervention quotas for brown bears.”

But some experts argue that the measure, if the country’s president signs it into law, will not get to the root of the problem, because it would not meaningfully reduce the amount of human-bear encounters.

“It will not prevent cases like this from happening again in the future,” Csaba Domokos, a bear biologist who works with the Milvus Group, a conservation organization in Romania, said in a telephone interview. Instead, he advised a change in behavior toward bears, noting that some people had even fed the animals by hand for selfies.