Changes in bear management threatens bear conservation in the Carpathians

This summer, the current Slovakian Minister of the Environment, Tomáš Taraba, changed national law to declare that the “occurrence” of an “unwanted” or “undesirable” brown bear constitutes an “emergency situation,” permitting the bear to be shot. The criteria for this are vague and subjective, and the assumption that indiscriminate culling alone will reduce conflicts lacks scientific evidence. The new law implementation is unlikely to address the root causes of why bears are attracted to urban areas—namely, the high availability of unsecured human food sources.

In response to these recent changes in bear management in Slovakia, the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe (LCIE) together with the International Association for Bear Research and Management (IBA) have issued an open letter to Slovak authorities. In their letter, expert organizations express concerns about the lack of transparency in the new regulation, the lack of focus in implementing measures to prevent bear presence in urban areas and educating the public to coexist with bears, and the failure to meet EU legal obligations in the matter of species conservation.

Bears roam freely across countries. The impact of Slovakia’s new bear management scheme will extend beyond its national borders, likely affecting bears in the Carpathians and their conservation status in neighbouring countries such as Poland and Czechia. Telemetry studies conducted by us have proven that it is difficult to find a bear on the Polish side that has not visited also Slovakia. Over eighty per cent of the bears tracked by us in Poland are transboundary. Bears living on the Polish-Slovak border have got used to food provided by humans, so they are at high risk of being killed according to the new rules introduced in Slovakia.

Bear killing is proven to have profound consequences for bears at the population level. Culling alters survival, reproductive strategies, and social structures, which can impact fitness, growth, and population dynamics. Negative effects may include increased sexual infanticide, reduced cub survival, and behavioural changes such as altered habitat use, foraging patterns, and circadian rhythms 1–4. There is no evidence that indiscriminate culling will reduce human-bear conflicts. The last fatality in Slovakia happened a few months after the indiscriminate culling was implemented.

From the Carpathian Brown Bear Project, we echo the concerns of LCIE and IBA and urge the Slovak Government to prioritize conflict prevention and public education, align bear management policies with EU legislation, and conduct independent assessments of current policies based on scientific evidence. We are deeply concerned also by the news about the unprofessional way of bear removal, which does not seem to follow any protocol (link to a video with sensitive content). Moreover, we emphasize that large-scale bear killing in Slovakia will undermine conservation efforts from the last decades, not only in Slovakia but also in the Carpathians and Europe.

By Carlos Bautista, Nuria Selva, Tomasz Zwijacz Kozica, Agnieszka Sergiel, and Martin Dul’a

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  1. Frank, S. C. et al. Indirect effects of bear hunting: a review from Scandinavia. Ursus 28, 150–164 (2017).
  2. Frank, S. C. et al. Sociodemographic factors modulate the spatial response of brown bears to vacancies created by hunting. J. Anim. Ecol. 87, 247–258 (2018).
  3. Leclerc, M., Frank, S. C., Zedrosser, A., Swenson, J. E. & Pelletier, F. Hunting promotes spatial reorganization and sexually selected infanticide. Sci. Rep. 7, 45222 (2017).
  4. Bischof, R. et al. Regulated hunting re-shapes the life history of brown bears. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 2, 116–123 (2018).
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