"If a bear attacks a human being once, experience shows that it will do so again. So, as soon as it's found, it will be killed straight away." With this statement, on Tuesday, March 26, Jaroslav Slastan, head of Slovakia's brown bear intervention teams, marked 10 days since he first took up the trail of an animal that had injured five people in the town of Liptovsky Mikulas on March 17. That day, images posted on social media by the panicked residents of this small town in the foothills of the Tatra mountains were shared all over Europe. They showed a distraught animal running madly between the houses.

"Local politicians are worried that it's going to happen again," explained the sturdy man clad in camouflage gear from the lobby of the town hall, as he took a few minutes' break to describe how his teams had set off in pursuit of a "male weighing around 100 kilos." "It's like a race against time with a fugitive prisoner," he said, detailing his array of night-vision drones in particular. The pressure was on, because the subject had become "political," said the patrolman.

In this Central European country blessed with some of the best preserved national parks on the continent, the long peaceful cohabitation with bears has suddenly become tense since a fatal attack in 2021, the first in 100 years. Since then, the number of attacks has been on the rise, with around 20 reported each year, each time reigniting what has become a genuine "bear war" – which has deeply divided Slovakia's 5.5 million inhabitants. A few days before the attack in Liptovsky Mikulas, a hiker had fallen to her death in a ravine after fleeing from a bear. On Thursday April 4, once again in the same region, a forest ranger was attacked, and had to fire warning shots to scare off the beast.

These animals have even become a feature of the campaign for the second round of the Slovakian presidential election, which was held on Saturday, April 6. On March 28, Peter Pellegrini, the victorious candidate who was backed by the populist, pro-Russian coalition government, announced that he was in favor of pushing through – as quickly as possible – a bill presented by the environment ministry, which authorized the slaughter of any bear "crossing into a 500-meter limit" around villages. This measure could run counter to European law, which only authorizes slaughtering these protected animals in cases of direct danger. The ministry, which since October 2023 has been controlled by the far-right Slovak National Party (SNS), has asked Brussels to lower this level of protection, with the support of its Romanian and Finnish counterparts.

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