[Animals] Bear kills jogger in Italian Alps. What does this mean for the effort to bring bears back to the region?

[BirSaNN]

26-year-old Andrea Papi was jogging on a woodland path when a bear with three cubs attacked and killed him.

Italian authorities are deciding what to do with a brown bear that mauled a jogger to death in the northeastern province of Trento. The case has shone a light on the country's successful — but problematic — rewilding program. 

On the evening of April 5, 26-year-old Andrea Papi was jogging on a woodland path near the village of Caldes. When he failed to return home, his family reported him missing. His mauled body was found at 3 a.m. the following morning. 

On April 8, provincial president Maurizio Fugatti, issued an order to kill the Alpine bear, but a court suspended that order following an appeal from animal rights group the Anti-Vivisection League (LAV), ANSA news agency(opens in new tab) reported. The bear, a female known as “JJ4,” was captured on April 17 accompanied by three cubs.

 

This is the second time JJ4 has had a kill order overturned, having previously attacked a father and son(opens in new tab) in 2020, Reuters reported. The victims of the 2020 encounter survived.

Claudio Groff coordinates the large carnivores sector within the provincial government's wildlife department. He told Live Science that Papi's death is even harder to accept because of what happened in 2020. "We tried to remove this dangerous bear," Groff said. "We didn't manage it, unfortunately, because of the decision of the court." 

Papi's death marks the first fatal bear attack in Italy, according to the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera(opens in new tab). However, bear-related incidents like this fuel a long-running debate about the presence of bears in the region.  

 How many bears are there in the Trentino-Alto Adige? 
Brown bears (Ursus arctos) were on the brink of extinction in the Alps in 1999, with only a handful surviving in the Trentino-Alto Adige region of Italy. The European Union-funded Life Ursus project(opens in new tab) brought bears from Slovenia to the region as part of conservation efforts to establish a minimum viable po[CENSORED]tion of around 40 to 60 individuals. Today, there are around 100 bears in Trentino-Alto Adige. 

Related: 'Prehistoric' mummified bear discovered in Siberian permafrost isn't what we thought   

"Italy is a great success story," said Lana Ciarniello(opens in new tab), an independent researcher in Canada and co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Human-Bear Conflicts Expert Team(opens in new tab), of which Groff is also a member. "The bears were reintroduced, and they've done very well."

The bear program has worked so well that the animals have made a remarkable recovery — but now the region is adapting to once again becoming, as Ciarniello puts it, "bear country." 

link: https://www.livescience.com/animals/bears/bear-kills-jogger-in-italian-alps-what-does-this-mean-for-the-effort-to-bring-bears-back-to-the-region