The Rome administrative court has suspended a cull order on a brown bear for fatally attacking a jogger in April 2023.

The bear, a 17-year-old female identified as JJ4, was captured after killing Andrea Papi, who was out jogging on 5 April 2023 near his village of Caldes in Trentino, a province in northern Italy.

Maurizo Fugatti, the provincial governor, ordered to have the animal put down but his call was suspended by the provincial court in May. It was not the first time Fugatti put forward the idea of culling JJ4. He proposed the same plan after the bear attacked two citizens in June 2020. The courts suspended both of Fugatti’s attempts after opposition from animal rights groups. 

Judges at the Rome administrative court said on 14 July 2023 that while the bear should be kept in captivity for public safety, the cull order was “disproportionate” and unnecessary. However, the reprieve is only until a further appeal is heard in December.

The Rome judges also gave a reprieve to MJ5, another bear that faced a cull order after injuring a man in March but has yet to be captured at the time of writing.

Both JJ4 and MJ5 belong to the group of bears that resulted from the LIFE Ursus program, which introduced ten bears from Slovenia to the Trentino region in 1999 to increase the population of wild bears. The number grew to around a hundred in just two decades. While many conservationists hailed the program as a success, experts claimed that public education on how people should behave and cohabitate with the bears was missing from the project, and bear-human conflicts have emerged.

Animal rights group LAV welcomed the court’s decision. They also urged the bear’s transfer to a safe refuge in Romania, where LAV has found a suitable facility and offered to cover the expenses.

Other places in Europe, such as Slovenia, have adopted culling to control the number of bears. The country’s government approved the culling of 230 brown bears in 2023, citing concerns over farmers and public safety. However, a professor of biotechnology commented that except for protecting food or cubs, bears usually avoid interacting with or attacking humans. 

In Hong Kong, culling was practiced against the wild boars. Before 2017, the Hong Kong government had two hunting teams formed by citizens, which would be commissioned to kill the animal when other citizens filed complaints. However, the government decided to dismiss the teams and replace them with a program that sterilizes and relocates wild boars when found in urban areas.

The policy was once claimed to be the “most advanced” policy on treating feral animals in a city, but it was halted and supplanted with a culling policy after an auxiliary police officer was injured by a wild boar in 2021. Different animal rights groups have greatly condemned the implementation, citing cruelty concerns and indifference toward animals’ rights. In addition, wild boar is also a timid species that tend not to take the initiative to attack people, except when they are over-sensitized or overwhelmed.

 Courtesy of Pit Hok Yau, Tim

Main Sources: BOL News, CNN, Initium, Slovenia Times, The Guardian