The Slovak cabinet has approved a plan to shoot around a quarter of the country’s brown bears, after a man was mauled to death while walking in a forest in Central Slovakia.
Prime Minister Robert Fico’s populist-nationalist government announced after a cabinet meeting that 350 out of an estimated population of 1,300 brown bears would be culled, citing the danger to humans after a spate of attacks.
“We can’t live in a country where people are afraid to go into the woods,” the prime minister told reporters afterwards.
I think people were much less afraid of bears back then. Also they were reasonable enough to conclude that a single human death by a bear was did not warrant the extirpation of all local bears.
And now the comment that got me a 3 day ban on Reddit: If people can’t live with animals, they will go extinct.