Andrea Papi was 26 years old, athletic, and often out and about in the mountainous forests around the town of Caldes in Trentino, northern Italy. As so often, shortly before Easter he had left the apartment in the afternoon for the usual jogging tour. When he did not come home, the family alerted the police, police officers and firefighters roamed the forest that evening, and dogs tracked down the body during the night. Bite marks from a bear were quickly assigned, but the exact course of the accident is still unclear.
For a while one could hope that the young man might have died of natural causes and then been found by a bear. After 24 hours, however, the result is now clear: the young jogger had obviously still fought with the attacker and had tried to defend himself with a stick – in vain.
This is a case that is extremely rare, but likely to cause general excitement. Here in Val di Sole in particular, people have been living with brown bears for years, the largest land predators in Europe. you live again with the bears, it must be precise, because it is well known that bears used to be widespread before civilization took away their habitats and almost wiped them out. Three animals were known in the Brenta area.
In 1999, the Adamello-Brenta Nature Park and the Autonomous Province of Trento/Trentino, in cooperation with the National Wildlife Institute INFS and with financial support from the EU, decided to import and release ten cubs from Slovenia in the “Life Ursus” project: three males and seven females. With success: almost all cubs survive, since 2015 the number of bears in the region has doubled. Today there are around 100 animals and they are native to the west of the autonomous province of Trento (Trentino): in the Val di Sole valley, where the young jogger was killed, around the village of Madonna di Campiglio, near the Val di Non valley, in the Giudicarie near Lake Garda and also around the Monte Bondone mountain range.
“Problem bear” Bruno also came from Trentino
Only occasionally do the bears – mostly males – migrate further and even appear in Austria, Switzerland or Germany. In 2006, Bruno the bear came from Trentino via Austria to Germany. Because he killed sheep, chickens and other domestic animals, he was declared a “problem bear” by the then Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber. The hunt for him took place under the scrutiny of the public before he was shot dead on June 26, 2006.
Usually the bears do not have cute names, but are registered with abbreviations. Bruno was JJ1, his also striking brother JJ3. Also known was M49, which was captured several times and was able to escape again and again, which is why it was nicknamed “Papillon”. These cases are media-savvy exceptions. Most of the time, the bears live inconspicuously and avoid people, as experts emphasize. In Trentino, children learn the right behavior when dealing with bears at school: don’t run away, don’t frighten the bear, lie flat on the ground if necessary, things like that. One can assume that Andrea Papi was also prepared. It is still unclear why he could not save himself.
The first thing to do now, as with any homicide, is to identify and find the perpetrator. The genetic results of the biological samples collected on site will help with this. Officials met for an emergency meeting, at the end of which the President of the Province of Trento, Maurizio Fugatti, announced the order to shoot. The other animals that recently attracted attention are also to be caught and shot.
Recently there had been several attacks on livestock
According to reports in the local media, the citizens of Caldes were by no means surprised by the recent accident. They reported that there had recently been several attacks on sheep and other livestock. At the beginning of March, a man who was walking his dog was attacked by a bear near the village and injured his head and arm. “It was only a matter of time before it got worse,” said a local resident.
Accordingly, a fierce debate has begun about the coexistence of bears and humans. The Coldiretti agricultural association sees a “serious risk to the safety” not only of the local population, but also for the economy, agriculture and, last but not least, tourism. Andrea Papi’s family wants to sue the province of Trento for having implemented the Life Ursus project without a referendum. And provincial president Fugatti is already making a gloomy oracle that, given the recent events, the Life Ursus project cannot last.