Trento, 16 June 2024 – The presence ofbear returns to divide the Trentino. In Val di Sole sightings in inhabited centers are increasing and for this reason the municipality of Malè calls for urgent interventions “to prevent painful and dramatic events from occurring in the future”, such as the death last year of 23 year old runner Andrea Papi attacked to death by a bear right in the woods of Val di Sole.
Now the plantigrades reach the countries: a Bozzana a week ago one was wandering near a polling station and last night another specimen in center of Male after until a few minutes before there had been a party with children. Sightings also in Veneto, in the Brescia area and precisely in Trentino where the population of plantigrades is growing and it is estimated that there are – at least – a hundred specimens.
The council demands that they come “immediately civil protection operators were made safe, equipping them at least with anti-bear spray to be able to act safely. Secondly, we need to start serious management of the bear problem, with control of head numbers through the forestry body and immediate removal of problematic and confident specimens; the solutions adopted so far, such as the anti-bear bins already installed in the Municipality of Malé, prove to be insufficient and simply palliative. The Province can and must already intervene today with the legislative instruments in force and therefore calls for serious and timely management of the situation. The Malé Municipality administration does appeal to all institutions capable of acting (European Union, State and Province), to prevent painful and dramatic events from happening in the future”, is the appeal of the municipal administration.
The bear spotted in the center of Malè (Facebook/Ansa)
They arrived immediately the protests in defense of the bear. The militants of Centopercentoanimalisti today have descended the Adige by dinghypassing through the center of Verona, displaying a banner of denunciation: “The aim – they explained – is to make known the policy of the provincial government of Trento which insists on the criminalization of animals and in the search for every pretext to kill them; in this they follow the desires of hunters, speculators, breeders, in short, the most backward part of the Trentino population”.
And again: “While they hypocritically flaunt images of woods and mountains, presenting themselves as an ecological Eden. The reality is very different: theor banner in Englishaimed above all at foreign tourists, and the choice of internationally famous locations (as in the recent raids), have precisely the aim of unmasking the politicians who talk about Nature but in fact kill it” declared the militants of the Animal Rights Movement who they stopped near the bridges to let people know about their battle.
Also on the attack the International Organization for Animal Protection (Oipa): “The councilor Claudio Cia, who released the video of the bear in the town of Malé, a supporter of the Trentino law which provides for the culling of up to eight bears a year, probably does not consider how much the lack of adequate prevention measures to ensure the safety of residents, hikers and the animals themselves could cause wildlife to encroach on residential areas. We cannot help but make a comparison – they say – with the management of bears in Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise national park where, to keep the bears safe, temporary traffic bans are also imposed. The autonomous Province of Trento still has a lot to learn on the subject of wildlife management”. Oipa recommends, “even in a proactive manner, to the administration led by Maurizio Fugatti to adopt bloodless tools of deterrence and prevention that favor a peaceful coexistence between animals and humans”.
