Practical jokes are a speciality for 13-year-old Oliver Biskupic. So when he shouted, ‘Dad, watch out – a bear!’ as they cycled together last Sunday, his father Filip ignored him. His reaction was understandable. After all, the pair were pedalling along a busy towpath in the centre of Liptovsky Mikulas, and though brown bears are often seen in the surrounding forests, they had never been known to stray into this scenic Slovakian town, framed by the snow-capped Tatra mountains.
Seconds after his son’s warning, however, the transport manager realised it had been in deadly earnest. Hit from behind with the force of a tank, Mr Biskupic was thrown from his bike, landing on his back. When he looked up in a daze, the 16-stone bear loomed over him.
As Oliver watched in distress, the young male bear began to bite and scratch at his father with his knife-sharp claws. ‘My instinct was to cover my face and neck with my hands and kick up as hard as I could,’ said Mr Biskupic.
Underplaying his horrific mauling, he adds: ‘We had a small fight, or so my son tells me. As the bear went for me, I could hear him breathing big, deep gulps. His power was incredible. Luckily, I’m pretty tall and strong [he is 6ft 3in and almost 16 stone] and I do a lot of sports, so I think that helped me to survive.’
Though the onslaught lasted only 30 seconds, it seemed an eternity. As he was being savaged, passers-by filmed with their mobile phones but no one came to his aid. ‘Not that they could have done much,’ he shrugs.
One shudders to imagine how many more might have been injured or killed had this been a weekday
As shown by the startling videos, which went viral this week, they had been attacked as the bear bounded past houses, a shopping precinct, two schools and a kindergarten (bizarrely appearing to use the pedestrian crossing as it veered across a main road)
In spring, when the weather is crisp and clear in the Tatras, skiers and hikers throng quaint streets and café terraces and pupils are often taught outside
Villagers whose houses border the forests were advised to stay indoors in the early morning and evening, when these furtive creatures are most active
He isn’t sure why it ended but thinks the bear might have been warded off by one of his kicks, which sprained his ankle. He was also left with deep puncture wounds to his ribcage and buttocks which, as he showed me, are now surrounded by purplish bruises.
As blood seemed to be streaming from his left eye, his immediate fear was that he had been blinded. Much to his relief, doctors later found the cut to be just above his eyebrow.
He doesn’t blame the bear. He assumes it was lost and he got in its way as it ran through the town ‘in panic’ and attacked him out of fear. Taken to hospital by the police, who had belatedly arrived on the scene, he learned that he wasn’t the bear’s only victim that afternoon.
Also being treated for nasty wounds and shock were four other locals: two middle-aged women, a girl of ten and a man of 72, who had been bitten while trying to escape from the animal by climbing a fence.
As shown by the startling videos, which went viral this week, they had been attacked as the bear bounded past houses, a shopping precinct, two schools and a kindergarten (bizarrely appearing to use the pedestrian crossing as it veered across a main road).
Pushing her three-month-old daughter Ema in a buggy, Dasa Deveckova told me she looked up to find the bear a few yards in front of them. Her impulse was to run. Remembering advice that she had read, though, she saved herself and her baby by continuing to walk at a steady pace and in the same direction.
The bear looked at them curiously, then ignored them. But one shudders to imagine how many more might have been injured or killed had this been a weekday.
For in spring, when the weather is crisp and clear in the Tatras, skiers and hikers throng quaint streets and café terraces and pupils are often taught outside.
The predator was spotted running across a green space before it hit the pavement again
The bear leapt up onto a pavement before attempting to make an attack on a man who managed to clamber over a fence and out of the bears presence just in time
Also, this 20-minute rampage came two days after a 31-year-old Belarusian walker had been killed in an encounter with another bear, fewer than ten miles away in the mountains. As her body was found at the bottom of a ravine, she is thought to have fallen to her death while being chased. Her 29-year-old boyfriend, who ran in another direction, survived.
These dramas have forced urgent action, coming at a time when brown bear attacks are rising exponentially – from 2000 to 2015 there were 19 deaths caused by the bears in Europe, while in the next five years there were 11 in Romania alone.
As I arrived here on Thursday, the state nature protection organisation was finalising emergency measures to safeguard people in 19 of Slovakia’s 72 departments where bears are most prevalent.
Villagers whose houses border the forests were advised to stay indoors in the early morning and evening, when these furtive creatures are most active.
Meanwhile, trackers and hunters armed with shotguns, thermal imaging equipment, and drones with new software designed to distinguish individual bears, were combing the woods for the bear that brought terror to the town. Though a council official assured me on Tuesday that the rogue bear had been cornered and would have been ‘eliminated’ by the time I reached Liptovsky Mikulas, by yesterday it was still on the loose.
In one clip, the bear was seen running across a zebra crossing as people ran for their lives
In two hamlets near the area where it is thought to be hiding, the lanes and playparks were deserted. Doors were locked and windows, too. Even the upstairs ones, for brown bears can not only run at 30mph, they climb as nimbly as steeplejacks.
However, the ramifications of this drama reach far beyond this mountain outpost. This is a story with huge ideological overtones.
It goes to the heart of the bitter clash between landowners and hunters, backed by Right-wing politicians who believe it is time to cull Europe’s burgeoning brown bear numbers, and doctrinaire eco-warriors supported by the liberal Left who demand that bears must be allowed to breed unchecked, no matter the cost to humans.
In Slovakia the row couldn’t have come at a more crucial time.Yesterday, first round voting took place in the presidential election and though the 5.5 million citizens may have other more pressing problems, since almost half the country is thickly forested the management of its bear population is always a key issue.
Environment minister Tomas Taraba, a member of the Right-wing Slovak National Party, was quick to make political capital out of last Sunday’s spate of attacks.
Terrifying footage captured the moment a bear bounded down a street in Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia, before attacking two people
The huge bear was seen running through the streets before attacking a 49-year-old-woman and a 72-year-old man, leaving both of them needing hospital treatment
He blamed the ‘tragic’ events squarely on the animal rights brigade who, he said, naively maintain that ‘bears are herbivores and pose no risk to humans’.
That a bear had felt emboldened to venture into a town, Mr Taraba said, was the fault of ‘extremist ecological groups that have turned parts of Slovakia into open air museums where one can no longer move normally’. He hit out at ivory tower legislators who have adopted an EU law that bans killing bears, barring exceptional circumstances when they pose an imminent threat.
This stand-off raises one of the EU’s most divisive questions: should states be allowed to break free from the shackles of one-size-fits-all Brussels legislation and make laws to suit their unique national problems?
It is a dilemma that will soon confront the EU’s Council of Environment Ministers. While a Brussels diktat protects brown bears, delegates from Slovakia and Romania (which has 8,000 of them, the continent’s highest number) will move to downgrade their endangered status.
Decades ago, unregulated hunting and habitat loss had seriously depleted the continent’s populations and their survival was threatened. Yet the EU ban has seen brown bears recover to the point where at least 17,000 now live in Europe, and perhaps many more, in an area stretching from Scandinavia to Spain.
Given that the animals’ survival is no longer threatened, and that they increasingly cause a menace, Slovakia and Romania will argue the time has come for culling to be permitted in some countries.
Any such move would be strongly opposed by the powerful wildlife lobby, including the WWF. They argue that confrontations between man and bear are inevitable, as forests are bulldozed for development, but can be minimised by fencing off known bear ranges and installing more secure food waste dumps. Yet a series of alarming events suggests the number of bears must be controlled. In Romania, 154 people were attacked between 2016 and 2021.
Last year, construction worker Cornel Crivat, 39, went for his daily run in the Carpathian mountains and never came back. His brother found his mutilated body a day later. ‘Every evening, the bears are around here. It’s terrible,’ despairs their mother Elena.
Random assaults are also prevalent in the Italian Dolomites, a popular destination for British skiers, where a controversial, EU-backed rewilding programme has boosted the once-dwindling brown bear population. There, too, this has sparked a political row.
After Andrea Papi, 26, was savaged to death in Trentino, northern Italy, last year, the province’s Right-wing governor Maurizio Fugatti ordered the culprit to be hunted and shot. Yet activists launched a legal appeal and the killer bear still roams free.
Not long ago in Slovakia hunting was popular. Bears were sought-after ‘trophies’ and could fetch €15,000 (£13,000). All that changed in 2003, when it joined the EU and incorporated the bloc’s laws.
In 2019, just three bear attacks were recorded in Slovakia. The following year the number doubled and by 2023 it had doubled again. Among the victims was a 57-year-old man found in the Bansko Valley wilderness with bites to his ribs and neck. His hands were also badly wounded, indicating he had waged a futile struggle.
How, then, has EU enforced protection affected bear numbers in Slovakia? Well, that depends on who one speaks to.
If we believe Erik Balaz, leader of a group called We Are The Forest, numbers might be as low as 1,000 or 1,500. While accepting that bear and man are increasingly colliding (literally, for 56 bears were killed by cars last year) he argues that clashes could be avoided with improved farming practices such as securing orchards and cornfields, where omnivorous bears forage.
He also advocates stricter rules for forest-goers. Yet none of this would have kept the bear from wandering into town and attacking people last Sunday, I challenge him. ‘Yes, well, you can’t prevent everything,’ he concedes.
‘When something like this happens, the officials panic and say, ‘Oh, we have to kill the bear’. But that isn’t the answer. Bears breed quickly, so even if you wiped out 50 per cent of them they would recover in five years. We need proper rules and methods.’
His views get short shrift from Jaroslav Slastan, the man leading the hunt for the bear that came to town last Sunday.
Relying on his first-hand experience, the nature protection agency official estimates that Slovakia could be replete with as many as ‘3,000, 5,000 or even 7,000’ bears. ‘The lower number comes from ecologists,’ he scoffs.
Determined to arm Slovakia’s EU delegation with an accurate figure before they seek an exemption from the hunting ban, he and his colleagues will soon begin a new count using DNA techniques for the first time.
With ‘attacks, encounters and collisions’ rising rapidly in tandem with the bear population, he believes bears are dangerously ‘losing their inhibitions’. And as they have no natural predators, culling is the only option.
Keeping their children indoors and peering around fretfully yesterday, villagers in Ilanovo – one of the mountain communities closest to the errant bear’s supposed lair – wholly concurred.
‘When I was a girl I could pick mushrooms in the forest without ever seeing a bear, but I wouldn’t go there now,’ said Maria, a great-grandmother in her 70s. ‘There are far more these days. We even find them sitting in our gardens.
‘I know they are victims, too, because we are pushing them out of their habitats with new buildings, but they just have to be controlled. We can’t put lives of bears before human lives, can we?’
Many would think not. In the Neverland that is Brussels, however, where bears are harmless, cuddly creatures, they must be protected. Even when they bring carnage and terror to town.
