Romanian Animal Rights NGO Fights Planned Bear Cull

Animal rights activists and environmental NGOs on Friday condemned an order allowing hundreds of bears to be killed signed by the former Environment minister of Romania, Tanczos Barna, on the last day of his mandate at the ministry.

The order allows a quota of almost 500 bears to be killed on the grounds that they pose a danger to humans.

"Based on the order, we again approved prevention and intervention quotas for the bear population: 426 specimens can be removed for prevention purposes and 55 specimens for intervention purposes," Barna wrote on his Facebook page on Thursday.

Tanczos Barna is one of the leaders of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania - UMDR - a party that represents the Hungarian minority in Romania and has been in various governing coalitions almost continuously in recent decades.

"In the Szeckely Land [in central Romania, inhabited mostly by ethnic Hungarians], since 2016, the increased number of bears has increasingly threatened people's lives and their property," explained Barna. He added that he worked on this order for the last 905 days in which he was at the helm of the ministry.

The order was sent to the Romanian Academy for approval, after which it will be published in the Official Gazette.

Environmental NGO Agent Green in Romania said the order is a serious mistake that will decimate the bear population in Romania, one of the last bastions in Europe of these rare animals.

"The brown bear is a species protected at the European level, which is very important for maintaining the balance of ecosystems. Because it is a species that can move over long distances, EU member states must manage this species so that it is habitable," Agent Green's lawyer, Catalina Radulescu, told...