A day after Felix Popescu returned to Bucharest from his holiday villa, he received a phone call. His property in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains had been broken into, his caretaker told him, and the suspect was a brown bear.
The 49-year-old surgeon said “this bear did not come only for my fridge, he visited every room in the house”, causing about €10,000 of damages. On the hunt for sugary products, Popescu believes the bear smashed about 20 bottles and slurped the alcohol amid the broken glass.
“He drank everything, he left me without vodka, without whisky, without champagne,” Popescu said. “He had a very good time in my house.”
The June incident was not unique. Romania’s estimated 8,000 brown bears, Europe’s largest population in the wild, are notorious for rummaging through bins, following skiers down slopes and breaking into premises. As Romanians’ relationship with the large mammal, a protected species under EU law, becomes increasingly fraught, some are calling for bigger hunting quotas to help protect their property and livestock.
“There are too many bears right now and they’re dangerous,” Popescu said. “They don’t have enough space.”
Encounters with Romania’s bears, which mostly reside in the Carpathian Mountains, can be deadly. Over the past seven years, 14 people have been killed and 154 attacked by bears, according to the environment ministry.
Attacks on property such as Popescu’s holiday retreat occur more frequently than direct interactions with humans. In the past two years, the Romanian state has paid out about €2.5mn in compensation for damages caused by bears, the ministry said.
On a drizzly July evening in the Transylvanian mountain resort of Predeal, Laura Niculescu monitors the activity of the town’s “garbage bears”. For the past five years, she has filmed the animals in the Prahova Valley where they rummage through waste and break into people’s homes.
On that tour, four bears appeared on the streets of Predeal and four more were seen in the surrounding forests. That evening, police officers trying to locate a bear wandering the streets said they had received one bear report every hour.
“We don’t have special teams to manage this situation,” Niculescu said.
She said a reservation similar to that of Italy’s Abruzzo national park, where “people pay to visit and see the bears”, would solve the bear problem. But she added that in Romania, “the interest is not to make money, it’s to kill them”.
In a sign of bears’ increasing confidence, Romania’s emergency services issued more than 4,000 text alerts about lurking bears between 2021 and May this year, up from 1,500 notifications in the previous two years.
But some experts believe that it is humans rather than bears that are changing their behaviour.
“Bears are the only wild species in Romania for which you can hope to get compensation if you have damages, so of course people will try to abuse it,” said Csaba Domokos, a nature conservation expert with Milvus Group, an NGO. “What is certain is that damages and conflicts have definitely received much more media attention.”
Authorities have tried different approaches throughout the years. In the communist era, bear hunting was one of the favourite pastimes of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his entourage. Large bears were often caught in cages and then released for him to shoot.
In 2007, when Romania joined the EU, bears became a protected species under EU law, though Bucharest contravened the directive by continuing to issue hunting quotas to kill several hundred a year.
In 2016, trophy hunting of bears was completely banned. But just a year later, a waiver system was introduced, under which the government issues “intervention permits” allowing hunters to kill “problematic” bears.
Critics argue these quotas are a ploy to sidestep the hunting ban as permits are often sold to trophy hunters.
In June, on his final day in office after Romania’s government changed hands as part of a power-sharing agreement, environment minister Barna Tánczos signed a decree allowing 481 bears to be killed this year, more than three times the number for 2022.
Romania’s new environment minister, Mircea Fechet, is aiming for a more modest quota of 220 bears this year, in line with the advice of the Romanian Academy, the country’s supreme scientific body. He described the bear issue as a “lose-lose” issue: whatever his decision, he’ll either upset the environmentalists or the hunters.
“We do have lots of conflicts between bears and civilian populations lately, and I’m afraid something really terrible might happen,” Fechet said.
For Romania’s farmers, bears can be a costly menace. In the Transylvanian village of Saschiz, at the foothills of the Carpathians, shepherd Ilie Cristea said bears killed several of his sheep last year.
“There are many bears, they create a lot of damage,” said Cristea, 51, who grew up in Saschiz. “The solution is to let the hunters reduce the bear population, there’s no other way.” But he added: “It would be horrible to kill them all.”
A changing landscape from small-scale farming to a proliferation of large crop fields around Saschiz provides the omnivores with “massive areas” of plentiful food, said veterinarian Răzvan Oachiş.
Bear trophies can fetch tens of thousands of euros for a single large male. Jozsef Benke, president of Zetelaka hunting association, said the 2016 hunting ban had severely diminished hunting associations’ revenue, given that nearly half of their revenue came from bear sales.
“The bear is a regenerable resource and it should be utilised,” he added.
One issue is that no one knows how many bears there are in Romania, where the hunting associations are traditionally responsible for counting them. “There is no clear methodology on how they collect, analyse or interpret this data,” Domokos said. “I don’t think it’s reliable.”
Gabriel Păun of conservation group Agent Green said authorities should increase their use of non-lethal methods to manage “problematic” bears, such as electric fencing, guard dogs, better waste management and the use of rubber bullets.
“The state should put some money in a network of large natural sanctuaries where they can live their lives with dignity,” he added.
