Slovakia backs plan to shoot 350 bears after man killed in attack

The Slovak cabinet has approved a plan to shoot around a quarter of the country’s brown bears, after a man was mauled to death while walking in a forest in Central Slovakia.

Prime Minister Robert Fico’s populist-nationalist government announced after a cabinet meeting that 350 out of an estimated population of 1,300 brown bears would be culled, citing the danger to humans after a spate of attacks.

“We can’t live in a country where people are afraid to go into the woods,” the prime minister told reporters afterwards.

A special state of emergency allowing bears to be shot has now been widened to 55 of Slovakia’s 79 districts, an area that now covers most of the country.

The government in Bratislava has already loosened legal protections allowing bears to be killed if they stray too close to human habitation. Some 93 had been shot by the end of 2024.

The plans to shoot even more were condemned by conservationists, who said the decision was in violation of international obligations and could be illegal.

“It’s absurd,” said Michal Wiezek, an ecologist and MEP for opposition party Progressive Slovakia.

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

“To cover up their failure, the government has decided to cull even more bears,” he continued.

Wiezek argued that thousands of encounters a year passed without incident, and he hoped the European Commission would intervene.

Slovak police confirmed on Wednesday that a man found dead in forest near the town of Detva in Central Slovakia on Sunday night was killed by a bear. His wounds were consistent with an attack.

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

He was found with what authorities described as “devastating injuries to the head”. Evidence of a bear’s den was found nearby, a local NGO told Slovak newspaper Novy Cas.

Bears have become a political issue in Slovakia after a rising number of encounters, including fatal attacks.

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

Several weeks later a large brown bear was captured on video running through the centre of the nearby town of Liptovsky Mikolas in broad daylight, bounding past cars and lunging at people on the pavement.

The authorities later claimed to have hunted down and killed the animal, although conservationists said later there was clear evidence they had shot a different bear.

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

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

Bears are common across the Carpathian mountain range, which stretches in an arc from Romania through western Ukraine and on to Slovakia and Poland.