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 population of around 40 to 60 individuals. Today, there are around 100 bears in Trentino-Alto Adige.
“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.”
What causes bear attacks?
Tom Smith(opens in new tab), a professor at Brigham Young University in Utah whose research focuses on human-bear conflicts, told Live Science that the most common cause of brown bear attacks is people unintentionally surprising them. Smith has studied more than 2,000 bear attacks in North America. He said all bears, regardless of whether they have cubs, can attack if approached.
“Anytime you intentionally or unintentionally run into a bear, you’re going to unleash a natural instinct in them, which is to defend themselves,” Smith said.
Bears typically avoid humans and run away if they hear people coming. Smith noted that certain human behaviors increase the chances of attacks, including trying to get close to bears, feeding them, leaving food around, mountain biking, walking alone or having a dog off the leash — bears don’t like dogs. However, according to Smith, solo runners are at greatest risk.
“That’s the worst thing you can do,” Smith said. “Runners are single, they move fast, they don’t make noise; it’s the perfect storm of bad variables.”