The situation with bear attacks in the villages of Sevlievo got out of control after a bear ate two goats, 40 chickens, and 20 quails in the village of Dushevski Kolibi. The municipality had to intervene and urgently evacuate one of the families whose animals had been eaten by the bear.
The family lives in a remote wooden house and raised two goats. They relied on them to provide milk for a bedridden man, an elderly woman, and another woman with poor mental health. Until September 3 this year, when late in the evening the bear entered their yard and ate one of the goats in front of their eyes. Three days later, it returned for the other one. It almost entered their home, said the village mayor, Dobri Dimitrov, who saw the remains of the bear’s feast with his own eyes.
Mayors want solutions
The village of Dushevski Kolibi is not in the Balkans, where mayors recently raised the alarm about frequent brown bear attacks. The mayor of the village of Kravnik, Tsvetan Vlaseev, who at the time recounted how a bear had even given birth in an abandoned house in the village, has now changed his tone towards the authorities.
At a meeting convened by the mayor of Sevlievo with representatives of the regional executive authorities, Vlaseev stated: “We want solutions.” And looking at the representative of the Executive Environment Agency (EEA), he added: “The owners of the bears should inform the institutions that we have a problem,” leaving no doubt that by “owners of the bears” he meant the EEA.
Vlasiev was provoked by the lack of commitment to the problem of frequent bear raids by the representative of the Executive Environment Agency in Veliko Tarnovo. According to her, people are to blame for bears coming into their homes because they leave food in their yards. As for solutions, they were only in the future tense and sounded typically bureaucratic – setting up commissions, writing protocols, forming a rapid response team, submitting claims for compensation, etc.
Population control
In Bulgaria, no one knows how many brown bears there are at present. Their number will become clear after the completion of a brown bear census project, which is being carried out for the first time in our country, according to the Ministry of Environment and Water (MEW). The project involves counting bear droppings “as a step towards the effective conservation and management of the brown bear, as it will provide concrete data on the size of its population.”
Until then, bears are coming down lower and lower into populated areas because they are hungry. And as we know, hunger is stronger than fear, and animals are becoming less afraid of humans when their goal is to secure food. It should not be overlooked that this year there is no fruit in the Sevlievo region due to the early frost on fruit trees. And when there is no food in the Balkans, bears start looking for it among humans. The problem is not with the animals, which are following their instincts, but neither is it with the people. The ultimate measure is population control, and in Sevlievo, a decision was made to ask the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry for permission to shoot one bear.
Letters to the ministries to bring the problem to Sofia
At the meeting with the mayor of Sevlievo, another decision was made—local institutions would send letters to the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food. The goal is for Sofia to understand that the people in the villages around Sevlievo are afraid and that this fear is real. However, it was not clear at the meeting why the country’s leaders have not yet been informed that bears in the Sevlievo area are already eating animals and that it is only a matter of time before they attack humans, even though this is the second meeting on the issue and three months have passed since the first. Meanwhile, the mayor of the village of Stokite, Georgi Aleksandrov, said that there are already farmers in his village who have been visited by bears six or seven times.
The forestry authorities are excluded from the process
We are constantly accused of doing nothing, but in fact we have no powers, commented the director of the Rositsa State Hunting Enterprise, Eng. Ivan Stepanov. In fact, with the adoption of the Updated Action Plan for the Brown Bear until 2022-2032, representatives of state forestry enterprises and state forestry and hunting enterprises have been excluded from the process of managing brown bear populations in Bulgaria. At present, their only legally regulated responsibility with regard to bears is to form a commission for the assessment and compensation of damage caused by brown bears. They have no right to sedate, relocate, or feed them.
And since local institutions are doing nothing, and forest rangers are deprived of their rights, it is only a matter of time before the local population takes control of the situation. They will start setting traps or laying poisoned bait, which does not solve the problem; on the contrary, it exacerbates it, because more animals may suffer alongside the one targeted.
So whatever is being discussed since May this year, when bears began to venture closer and closer to people’s homes, is the responsibility of the state. The expectations are for concrete measures, which could be the resettlement of the bears, driving them high up into the mountains, but not feeding them, as requested by the director of the Rositsa State Forestry Enterprise, Eng. Ivan Stepanov, angry at the insistence of the Executive Environment Agency that feeding the bears is unacceptable, even though it is precisely because of a lack of food that they are coming down to the villages. hinders the animals.
In Sevlievo, they expect the state to do what is necessary so that people and animals can live without the former trembling with fear while the latter become aggressive from hunger.
