A 120kg female brown bear that had to be tranquilised on Tuesday this week in the town of Sklabina and shipped back to the wild by the fire brigade, made the fatal mistake of coming back yesterday, Wednesday 1 December.
The bear had been enjoying the scraps of food that it could get from the waste bins in the town, where it freely wandered, while local residents feared for their lives. This time, though, as police tried to sedate the animal again, it turned on them and even bit one of the animal specialists on site.
The police therefore wasted no time and shot the animal dead. Bear visits to populated areas is nothing unusual, but they normally stay on the periphery, while this poor bear went right into the heart of the local community. Some experts think the bear’s hibernation may have been disturbed, but an autopsy will be carried out to see if this reveals anything about the bear’s unusual behaviour.
There are hundreds of bears in the Slovak countryside, and the number of incidents of bears getting too close to humans has been on the increase in recent years.