According to news site Pravda.sk, a brown bear attacked hikers near the village of Pribylina at the foot of the Tatra Mountains late Sunday afternoon, following an attack on mushroom pickers in the area the day before, MTI reported.
In Sunday's attack, a member of a middle-aged couple who was walking a dog was injured in the leg. He and his wife managed to escape from the bear in a nearby hut and called the police from there.
The police also alerted ambulances and the Environmental Protection Working Group (SOP), which specializes in such cases. The man was taken to the hospital with minor injuries, where he was released after receiving treatment.
The mushroom collector who was attacked on Saturday was not injured. According to the man's account, he was walking in a forest with dense bushes above the village of Velosturani and encountered a brown bear that rushed towards him, but the man shot him with his pistol and wounded him.
Bear repellers, who were alerted to the incident, searched the area with the help of hunters, and found the bear, which then attacked one of the hunters. After being shot, the monster fled into the dense forest, where it got lost.
It also happened last Tuesday in the Lepto region that a brown bear that strayed into a residential area and injured five people in Leptoszentmiklos on March 17 was shot. The victims, aged between 10 and 72, suffered bites and scratches, and one of them nearly lost his eye.
Bears have been a problem for a long time
According to the SOP declaration, reports of damage to or accidents with bears in Slovakia are the result of a long-standing problem that has not been resolved to this day.
Therefore, SOP is currently in intensive negotiations with users of hunting grounds in some regions about a procedure that will be jointly developed to reliably identify problem bears, and ensure their eventual release, in cooperation with hunters.
At the same time, the coexistence of humans and bears has also become a political issue in Slovakia. The current Slovak government wants to significantly ease the strict conditions for shooting bears.
Last week, Prime Minister Robert Fico's government approved a draft constitutional law that generally allows the shooting of bears wandering into settlements, but the law will need opposition votes to pass.
However, according to the largest opposition party, Progressive Slovakia, the law is not in line with EU law, as it only allows the shooting of animals proven to cause problems.
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