The Alpine row over 'problem bears'

A debate over troublesome bears in the Alps shows the complex challenge of rewilding large carnivores.

It was May 2001, and the team behind a pioneering brown bear rewilding project in the Italian Alps were jubilant. "Today, Jurka arrived!" they announced proudly. "A splendid 90kg (198lbs) specimen s the family of bears imported from Slovenia." Jurka peeked out of her transport container, then climbed down a ramp into her forested new home, the Adamello Brenta Nature Park in Trentino.

In much of the Alps, bears had been hunted into extinction and only remained as stuffed specimens in museums. Now an European Union-funded project called Life Ursus was slowly turning back the clock. The population grew to around 100 today, beyond even the rosiest projections.

But after a series of attacks on people, the future of the bears is now in doubt. What's going on? Is a tiny number of isolated incidents sparking an Alpine mass panic? Or is there a genuine pattern of unusually troublesome behaviour among the returning bears?

The carnivores' comeback

In the early days, a majority of locals ed the Life Ursus project. Wildlife groups and scientists praised it as a conservation success, and a potential model for brown bear recovery. Most of the bears lived shyly in the forest, fed on insects, plants and berries, and avoided humans. A few crossed the Alps, popping up in Austria, and Switzerland. Eventually, conservationists hoped, such dispersal might help create a kind of Alpine bear belt – a border-crossing habitat that would ensure the species' long-term survival.

Today, the picture looks less happy. Jurka now lives behind a heavily fortified fence in a wildlife park in , having been removed from Trentino for being a potential threat to humans. This year, Jurka's daughter JJ4, who was guarding her cubs, killed a jogger named Andrea Papi. It was JJ4's second attack, and one of seven bear attacks on humans in Trentino in the last decade. Other bears have mauled livestock and plundered beehives. In many parts of the Alps, there is a heated debate over what the return of the bears means for rural communities. Some people see their own freedom and safety under threat.

"The case in Trentino really scared people here," says Michaela Skuban, a wildlife biologist researching bear-human co-existence in Tyrol, on the Austrian side of the Alps. "They think: 'What if something like this happened here">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });