A Fatal Bear Attack Fuels a Fight Over Rewilding
In the mountains of northern Italy, when there’s a wedding in the village, friends often paint the names of the happy couple on a bedsheet and hang it near the main road. A similar sheet currently hangs above the roundabout in the small town of Caldes, in the province of Trentino, but it features just one name: Andrea. Sempre con noi. “Andrea. With us always,” punctuated with a single spray-painted heart.
It’s been two weeks since the body of Andrea Papi was found in the forests near his hometown. The 26-year-old trail-running enthusiast was out training when he was attacked and killed by a bear. His death—the first fatal bear attack in western Europe in modern times—has sparked fierce debate in Trentino and beyond. As media commentators and online comment sections cast around for someone to blame, attention has turned to scientists and the province’s Wildlife Department. Were it not for a 25-year-old rewilding program, the argument goes, the bear would not have been there.
By the mid-1990s, brown bears (Ursus arctos) had become functionally extinct in the Alps. The handful of remaining animals, all living in Trentino, were too few to be able to reproduce. But between 1996 and 2004, two EU-funded projects, called LIFE Ursus I and II, set out to reverse this decline and save the species, which plays a vital environmental role in the area. Bears are ecosystem engineers. They clean up carcasses, strip bark from trees, and help spread plant and berry seeds with their droppings. They also control populations of deer and other prey species, which in turn allows certain plants to thrive, providing habitat for species further down the food chain and improving biodiversity.
Over the course of the LIFE Ursus projects, 10 animals were captured in Slovenia and released into the province. This population has been carefully monitored and managed, to the point where there are now over 100 individuals living in Trentino. When it was launched, the initiative was hugely popular, with surveys showing 75 percent public support. Now, in the emotionally charged aftermath of Papi’s death, all these years of painstaking scientific work could be undone.
“It could be a huge step backward, I fear,” says Claudio Groff, director of the Large Carnivores Division in Trentino’s Wildlife Department and one of the authors of the original feasibility report on which the LIFE Ursus projects were based. According to the surveys conducted over the course of the project, public opinion had already become less favorable toward the presence of bears, he said. “Now, obviously, the level of public acceptance will fall further, the risks of poaching will rise, and whatever the outcome, it will be bears as a whole that will pay the price,” Groff says.
The initial reaction from Trentino’s politicians seemed to confirm his worst fears. The province’s president, Maurizio Fugatti, of the populist right-wing Lega party, has said that in addition to killing the bear in question—a 17-year-old female with three cubs, known as JJ4—he wants to cull or deport 50 to 70 other animals. This, he claims, would bring the population down to a manageable level.
The disposing of 70 bears as a solution has no obvious basis in science, according to various experts WIRED spoke to, including Groff and Paolo Pedrini, head of the Vertebrate Zoology Unit at MUSE, Trentino’s natural history museum. But even if it doesn’t happen, the scientists concede that the fragile public consensus on which the rewilding program was based has been shaken, if not shattered entirely.
“If you look on Facebook and in the newspapers, there’s a really strong anti-bear reaction,” Pedrini says, “and there’s also an angry reaction from bear lovers and animal rights activists—people who don’t want any bears to be put down in any circumstances.” Neither, he believes, is helpful, and the danger is that both sides will turn against the experts who are best-placed to suggest solutions.
“We need better communication on why the project was initiated in the first place,” says Marco Salvatori, who runs MUSE’s bear-monitoring project in collaboration with Trentino’s Wildlife Department. “There’s a lack of knowledge in Italy on many levels, around conservation in general and the biodiversity crisis in particular.” The public also needs to be better informed about how to live with bears on a practical level, he says. Because the animals returned to Trentino only relatively recently, many in the province are unaware of basic bear safety protocols—practices that are common knowledge in countries like the US and Canada.
“What we always say is that the provincial government reintroduced bears physically but they didn’t reintroduce bears culturally, and they needed to do the two in parallel,” says Massimo Vitturi, head of the Wild Animal Department at the animal rights group LAV. (Founded in 1977 as the League Against Vivisection,…