It was around 5 pm on March 15, and the light was fading fast, when Constantin and Tatiana were attacked by the bear. The young couple, aged 29 and 31 and identified in local media reports only by their first names, were Belarusians living in Poland. But Constantin had been working for the winter as a ski instructor in JasnĂĄ, a popular resort in neighboring Slovakia. The winter season was coming to an end, and on a day off heâd decided to go hiking with his girlfriend beneath the 4,718 foot-high peak of Na Jame, in the Slovak national park surrounding the resort.
What happened next is not exactly clear, but newspaper reports suggest that when the couple encountered the bearâa young male weighing about 265 poundsâthey ran in different directions. Finding himself alone, Constantin tried calling Tatiana. When he failed to get a response, he called mountain rescue. It was dark when they eventually found Tatianaâs body, with the help of a search dog. Sheâd apparently fallen down a ravine, sustaining fatal injuries to her head.
As with previous bear-related fatalities, both in Slovakia and across Europe, the incident has sparked accusations that conservationists are protecting bears at the expense of peopleâs safety. In 2021, a 57-year-old man was killed by a bear in the same national park, stoking community tensions about their presence and leading to calls for a cull. As it stands, however, hunting the animals is banned under both Slovakian and European law, and experts argue vociferously that a lack of educationârather than a focus on conservationâis the primary cause of the problem.
âItâs really kicked off here, with the press and politicians I think making some unjustified statements,â says British-born zoologist Robin Rigg. A specialist in large carnivores, Rigg is the chair of the Slovak Wildlife Society, which he set up in 1998, two years after moving to the country. Initial reports suggested that Tatiana might have been killed by the bear itself rather than by her fall, Rigg explains. âAnd itâs been said in publicâactually by someone from the Ministry of the Environmentâthat it was a predatory attack. But I donât see the evidence for that.â
Although the animal was near the body when rescuers found Tatiana, âthat doesnât mean the bear was intending to kill and consume her,â Rigg says. He stresses that he hasnât seen all the evidence, so any conclusions are provisional. But he has seen some of the grisly photos that were leaked to the media, âand none of them show signs of consumption.â Puncture marks found in the young womanâs leg, he says, âlook like claw marksâtheyâre not signs of feeding.â
âIt’s extremely rare in Europe to have predatory attacks, and itâs not a common thing anywhere in the world,â Riggs says. This incident occurred in an area where bears are known to hibernate, at a time of year when they are just waking up. âAnd what can sometimes happen is that the bear reacts aggressively in defending itself, which is what I think is most likely to have happened in this caseâthat it was startled by these two people appearing,â Rigg says.
Unfortunately, this kind of nuance doesnât often feature in coverage of bear attacks. âYouâre actually more likely, statistically, to get hit by lightning or have an allergic reaction to a bee sting,â Rigg says, âbut people donât worry as much about that as they do about a big animal with sharp teeth and claws. It goes back to an instinctive fear thatâs been with us since prehistoric times.â
The argument that Slovakiaâs bears are nothing to be afraid of was further undermined when footage emerged of an animal galloping down a main street in LiptovskĂœ MikulĂĄĆĄ just two days after Tatianaâs death. The animal was filmed lunging aggressively at pedestrians, who jumped over fences to escape. No one was seriously hurt, but the video went viral. âAnd now,â Rigg says, âweâve had these two incidents within 48 hours of each other, within a few kilometers of each other. So the tendency is to look at them together and ask, âWhat should we do about bears?ââ
Itâs a question thatâs become increasingly pressing in recent yearsânot just in Slovakia but throughout Europe. Having been hunted to the point of extinction in many countries, brown bears had their âstrictly protectedâ status enshrined in EU law in 1992. In most areas where theyâre present, bear populations are increasing, and there are now an estimated 17,000 brown bears living in rural areas across the continent. The recovery of this keystone species has been celebrated as a huge win by biologists and biodiversity expertsâbut itâs not been without its problems.
In the Pyrenees, the mountains that straddle the border between France and Spain, French and Spanish farmersâ unions, sick of dealing with damage to crops, beehives, and livestock, have called for bear numbers to be cut. In the northern Italian province of Trentino, where bears were reintroduced as part of an EU-funded rewilding project, the tragic death of trail runner Andrea Papi in April 2023 brought simmering resentments bubbling up to the surface. To the horror of local scientists, Trentinoâs right-wing populist president, Maurizio Fugatti, proposed killing half of the carefully nurtured population of around 120 bears overnight.
Yet, experts say, culling bears is far from the best way to prevent future tragedies. In the wake of Andrea Papiâs death, the local natural history museum invited Tom Smith, a bear management specialist from Utahâs Brigham Young University, to give a talk about how such issues are dealt with in North America. In a sign of how high community tensions were running, the museum took the unusual step of posting an armed guard at the entrance.
In his talk, Smith suggested that the solutions were relatively simple: âWhat you have here isnât necessarily a bear problem, itâs a people problem,â he said. Unlike in North America, where people in bear areas have grown up with the animals, Europeans living near recently recovered populations donât necessarily know how to behave. But with some basic bear-awareness trainingâof the kind thatâs taught âin kindergartenâ in some Canadian provincesâthe number of dangerous or fatal encounters could be vastly reduced.
Smith runs the North American Human-Bear Conflict Database, which contains detailed information on 2,175 historic attacks, with âa quarter-million data points.â âWhat Iâve learned by studying these events,â he told the crowd, âis that 60 percent of them were totally unnecessaryâand could have been avoided if people had behaved differently.â In an interview a few days later, Smith talked specifically about Papiâs death, telling WIRED, âI can go through the details and say, âYou should never do that, or that, or that,â and itâs not victim blaming, itâs trying to say, look, this was fully preventable.â
Tragically, this also appears to have been the case in Slovakia. âUnfortunately, the route that they chose was a very risky one,â Rigg says. âItâs not a recognized hiking route, and itâs a part of the park thatâs strictly protected, so they shouldnât have been there. Added to that, itâs a limestone area, and thatâs an area Iâd expect there would be denning bears.â The encounter happened around dusk, when crepuscular creatures like brown bears tend to be more active.