An Italian motorcyclist was mauled to death by a bear in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains on Thursday, emergency service officials confirmed.
The female bear who was with her cubs reportedly dragged the motorcyclist down an 80-meter deep ravine. The victim was an 48-year-old Italian who had stopped to take photos of the bear family in an area where there were signs warning tourists about the animals. The bear has been shot but it is not clear whether it died, emergency workers said.
“The bear had already killed a man, he was her prey, her food, that’s what she thought,” said Dragoș Onea, from the Arges Mountain Rescue team. .
The incident comes a year after a 19-year-old female hiker was killed while walking the a popular trail in central Romania.
The incident is the latest fatal attack in a country which has the European Union’s largest brown bear population, of between 10,000 to 13,000 by a recent DNA study.
Police and emergency services issued a joint statement after the attack, alerting tourists to the mauling on the Transfagarasan road in central Romania.
Nearly 30 people have been killed by bears in Romania over the past two decades, of which 19 deaths occurred in the last five years, according to the environment ministry.
Sightings of bears are common and local media regularly report bear attacks on humans and livestock.
Apart from deaths, some 274 people have been disfigured by bears in the last 20 years, former Environment Minister Mircea Fechet reported in 2024.
In 2024, Romania’s parliament moved to control the bear population and remove animals that regularly enter cities in search of food and doubled the yearly bear kill quota to 481 a year.
The move was taken to control the size of the bear population and to remove animals that have become accustomed to entering cities in search of food.
Wildlife experts say said bear attacks have increased because of human behavior as the shrinking of the animals’ habitats due to construction, logging and climate change.
Many bears are also attracted by garbage dumps and discarded foods in cities.
There is criticism that officials have failed to increase prevention measures, such as electric fences and better waste management.
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