Estonia limits bear hunting to Environmental Board permits

Bear hunting in Estonia is now allowed only with a special permit from the Environmental Board, ERR reported on Sunday. Hunters say the change means the country’s regular bear hunt will effectively not take place this year.

The hunting rules were amended this spring, and since April permits may be issued only for nuisance bears. Three special permits have been issued so far for bears blamed for destroying beehives in Harju County and near the border of Tartu and Põlva counties.

“We are talking about roughly 25 to 30 attacks in the region. Preventive measures varied: some hives were located right next to houses, while others were groups of hives enclosed by five-wire electric fences,” said Tanel Türna, head of the Environmental Board’s hunting and aquatic life department.

Hunters said the regular hunt used to limit the bear population can no longer be carried out, although the number of hunting permits had been based on scientists’ recommendations.

“The Environmental Agency recommends how many bears should be hunted, and this year the figure is up to 150. Considering that about three permits have been issued and how much time and resources it takes to issue each individual permit, the number recommended by scientists will certainly not be reached,” said Tõnis Korts, executive director of the Estonian Hunters’ Society.

Both hunters and the Environmental Board said food supplies and suitable habitats are limited. With the bear population currently high, they said the animals can no longer all fit into the forests and encounters between bears and people are expected to increase.

Eleri Lopp, who leads the NGO Estonian Large Carnivores and has repeatedly challenged bear hunting in court and won, disagreed.

“People can make such populist and demagogic claims, but we do not actually know how many bears there are. The Supreme Court also made a decision concerning wolves and said the state was violating the law because the monitoring was not good enough. There are all kinds of opinions on this, but we still have to rely on facts,” Lopp said.

The Environmental Board has dealt with seven bears that entered people’s yards this year. Türna said some were very young cubs born this year, while others were about one and a half years old.

“They are not clearly nuisance individuals in the sense of what we mean by a nuisance individual here, but this is a very serious problem,” he said.

According to Türna, it was clear that the bears had received food from people and therefore were not afraid of them. Smaller bears were returned to the wild, while hunting permits are being considered for bears that killed chickens in farmyards.

According to 2025 wildlife monitoring data, Estonia has at least 1,000 bears. Their population has doubled over the past 20 years.