Andrea Papi was 26 years old. The body of this trail lover was found in a ravine on April 5, in the Trentino region of Italy. And the autopsy is formal, the young man succumbed to the attack of a male bear that the authorities are now planning to shoot. This drama, extremely rare, revives the controversy in the Pyrenees, where the efforts to reintroduce plantigrades for twenty years are comparable to those deployed in the mountains of northern Italy. A hundred bears live there, 76 in the Franco-Spanish chain according to a very last count.
On the French side of the massif, the pastoral community was the first to react. “This death was not supposed to happen. This misfortune could only happen, however, ”deplores the Association for the sustainable development of the identity of the Pyrenees (Addip), which federates collectives hostile to the bear. “In Trentino, as in the Pyrenees and the Spanish Cantabrian Mountains, the local populations have had the presence and protection of bears imposed on them against their will, not without having, knowingly, regularly alerted them to the threats posed by these animals. dangerous on daily life and public safety”, continues their press release, emphasizing the fact that Andrea Papi “was neither a hunter nor a shepherd”.
Grim Numbers War
In the other camp, that of the defenders of the bears, we try to put the event into perspective. “This is the first death due to bears in western Europe for decades and in the world there are on average six to seven deaths per year”, underlines Patrick Leyrissoux, the bear referent of the association Ferus. The activist prefers to put it into perspective, noting that a hunter was killed by a deer in 2017 in France, that others were injured by wild boars, and that it happens that hikers are loaded by cattle in the mountain pastures of the Pyrenees.
For the CAP-Ours collective, “the risk of an accident presented by the bear, although highly publicized, is not higher, or even lower than that presented by other large wild or domestic mammals”. In Addip, anti-bears keep a more macabre count. They look to Eastern Europe, with two deaths in 2021, that of a Slovak and that of a Romanian shepherd who gathered his flock. “In our Ariège Pyrenees, a hunter owed his salvation in 2021 only to his weapon which allowed him to shoot down the bear who had seriously injured him and was hounding him”, alluding to death of the female Caramelle on which a judicial investigation is still in progress.
Do ” low profile » in case of meeting
The Italian drama falls rather badly for the friends of the bears, at a time when the authorities carry out a new public consultation to generalize, under certain conditions, the scaring of Pyrenean bears that are too ferocious with herds and in particular “reinforced” scaring, authorizing non-lethal shots. This procedure is the subject of a legal standoff that has lasted for several years between the NGOs and the Ministry of Ecology, the decrees being published, challenged by the administrative justice, then rewritten again.
Defenders of the plantigrade, however, see in the meticulous investigation underway in Italy into the death of Andrea Papi, an opportunity to improve information and prevention. “Scientists and ethologists have been put in the loop, and that’s a good thing,” says Patrick Leyrissoux. The specialist recalls that a flyer is distributed by the authorities to the attention of tourists and hikers on the road in the Pyrenees on the attitude to adopt in the event of an “encounter”. But he regrets that it is sometimes “hidden in the back of a closet in some tourist offices” and that the planned prevention signs are slow to be planted.
The general advice is to “keep a low profile” in all circumstances. “It’s easy to say, recognizes the activist. But you have to try to stay calm. Fidgeting, shouting or bringing a stick to strike would only make things worse and trigger in the bear, like in any other predator, an innate pursuit reflex. No need to try to fight against “200 kg of muscle and a top speed of 55 km/h”. Upstream, to avoid the encounter, it is best not to surprise the animal – “with low eyesight but with a very developed sense of smell and hearing” – by hiking rather noisily.