Estonia authorises hunting of two bears visiting homes

Estonia’s Environmental Board has issued a special permit to hunt two bears born last year after repeated attempts to drive them into the forest failed in the village of Võõbu in Järva County, ERR reported. Bear researcher Mati Kaal said bears accustomed to people are almost impossible to retrain to fear humans.

Three cubs first appeared in a Võõbu yard about 10 days ago. Liisa Hendrikson, who encountered the bears at her home, said they did not appear afraid of people and seemed to be seeking contact. The animals also showed little reaction to the noise the Environmental Board recommended residents use to drive them away.

“I was basically screaming in their faces from three metres away and banging pieces of firewood together, and they practically did not react. They showed no fear of the sounds or anything else,” Hendrikson said.

Rescuers managed to catch and remove one of the cubs. The other two spent hours in a tree before coming down at dusk and leaving. Hendrikson said they appeared briefly startled when one of the group disappeared.

On Thursday afternoon, the two cubs settled in another Võõbu yard. Rescuers tried to drive them away with a siren, but the animals only came down from a birch tree after being sprayed with water. The process had to be repeated because the bears returned to the yard after initially fleeing into the forest.

As it was not possible to capture the animals, the Environmental Board issued an emergency hunting permit. The bears were not hunted on Thursday, but the permit remains valid.

“The Rescue Board left the scene, but the bears remained nearby. If they had returned during the night and broken into a barn or residential building, or encountered someone alone in the dark, we saw a real risk of a very serious conflict,” said Tanel Türna, head of the Environmental Board’s hunting department.

Türna said the bears weighed about 70 kilograms and were very strong, despite being young bears from last year. He said the animals had been offered to zoos and animal parks, but no one was willing to take them in.

Kaal said issuing the hunting permit was unavoidable because it is almost impossible to retrain bears accustomed to people to avoid them. He said the animals were likely visiting home yards because they had learned that people and places associated with them offered easy access to food.

“They have simply become used to getting food from people, either through deliberate feeding or because someone took rotten apples or other food waste to the edge of the forest last year,” Kaal said.

Võõbu has an RMK camping site and hiking trail, and food waste left behind there may be one reason the bears have begun associating people with food, Kaal said.

He added that waving a broom would probably have been enough to drive away bears as young as the current animals, which are about one and a half years old. An adult bear, however, cannot be driven away so easily, he said, because bears are stubborn and extremely powerful.