Loaded for Bear: Planned cull in Slovakia brings a harsh African reality to Europe

Regular readers of this column know its tag is “Loaded for Bear” — and this one is about people who will be exactly that.

To wit, the Slovakian government has given the green light to cull 350 of the central European country’s brown bears, roughly a quarter of the population.

The reason given for this measure is simple: human life has been threatened by wildlife.

A 59-year-old man was mauled to death last month while walking in a forest in central Slovakia, the latest attack on humans by the omnivorous mammals in the country.

“We can’t live in a country where people are afraid of going to forests,” Prime Minister Robert Fico was quoted as saying.

According to the AP, the government has declared a State of Emergency in 55 of Slovakia’s 72 counties, which triggers the legal framework for the environment ministry to load up for bear.

A State of Emergency, nogal!

The bear-like and burly Fico, it must be said, is a populist who is close to Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, and he is known for shooting from the hip.

There is no doubt that this open season on bears has many greens seeing red. Environmental groups such as WWF have criticised it, saying that measures should be considered to reduce human/bear encounters and that shooting the animals will do little to address the problem.

This planned bear cull throws an interesting light on how Europe is reacting to a harsh reality mostly associated with Africa — lethal human/wildlife conflict between people and big critters.

People and predators

For centuries and even millennia, Europeans have inhabited a region that has been overwhelmingly culled of wild animals that, from a human perspective, are dangerous and menacing. What was once a landscape of fear for humans has largely been tamed and replaced by one that is benign — where people are not afraid to go into the forest.

But rewilding initiatives have seen brown bears and wolves return to habitats and regions where the species were extinct or extremely rare. According to The Guardian, Europe’s brown bear population has risen by 17% over the past decade to more than 20,000, while wolf numbers over that period surged by 35% to 23,000.

This expansion in the range and populations of predators has heralded a rise in conflict with humans and attacks, which has politicised the issue.

When a woman from Belarus died after falling into a ravine while fleeing from a bear, Slovakia’s far-right environment minister, Tomáš Taraba, blamed the European Union’s protection of the species, which he said showed a lack of compassion regarding “... the lives of our people and the lives of our children”.

This echoes the sentiments of many Africans when it comes to European or North American views of the continent’s wildlife and the danger it can pose to poor, rural communities.

During the uproar a decade ago over the killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe by a US dentist, Goodwell Nzou, a Zimbabwean doctoral student studying in the US at the time, penned an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled “In Zimbabwe, We Don’t Cry for Lions”.

“Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people,” he wrote.

Now, we have a populist Slovakian politician asking something similar about the EU establishment in Brussels.

Politico has noted that Taraba’s EU-bashing over bears was a vote-winner for his Slovak National Party.

I don’t see it purely as a left/right political issue, and I detest Europe’s far-right parties and movements. But the Slovakian right has highlighted the topic in an interesting way by placing the welfare of humans above that of wildlife — even if this has been done for populist political gain by politicians who have a questionable record on wider environmental issues.

For the most part, Europeans and North Americans simply do not want to live in the presence of large, dangerous animals. This is not unusual — it is hard-wired into the DNA of Homo sapiens.

Most Europeans are still unlikely to encounter a brown bear while taking a hike, and the vast majority would not want them in their backyard. But rural Slovakians and Romanians inhabit a landscape far removed from that of urban Europeans, who often identify as green.

For example, when it comes to Africans and wildlife, a double standard has often been applied. While Europeans would be aghast at the idea of sharing their living space with lions and elephants — I mean, think of the children! — it is somehow seen as okay for poor, rural Africans to do so because that is just their lot in life and they must suck it up.

This has been thrown into sharp relief by the unfolding tragedy unleashed by a botched elephant translocation to Kasungu National Park in Malawi, which has transformed the reserve’s border areas into a terrifying zone of conflict between people and pachyderms — an issue I have covered extensively.

Read more: Loaded for Bear: How would you like it if someone dumped 263 elephants in your backyard?

Europe’s rewilding efforts — which it must be said are in many ways noble, fascinating and vital for ecosystem restoration and scientific research — are now bringing such issues to Europe itself, and so the political response and public debates will be interesting from an African perspective.

Will there be campaigns to save Slovakia’s bears? Will one that is culled get a name like Cecil? And will the voices of rural Slovakians who live in close proximity to bears be heard?

Some conservationists even dream of restoring Pleistocene wildlife such as extinct rhino and elephant species to European landscapes. This looming brawl over bears may be a harbinger of future rewilding battles in Europe — battles that will be familiar to Africans. DM