Hunters find footprint of bear that killed two in Erzurum

Erzurum said a team of six hunters organized a search party to find the bear in the mountainous area, based on information from villagers as to where the bear may roam. Yesterday the team found footprints left by a large bear at a point between Yeşilyurt and Düzköy in rural İspir.

“We faced difficult land conditions during our search. This is a wooded area thick with thorns, shrubs and club-moss. We hope that the footprints we found belong to the killer bear. When we find her, we will anesthetize the bear with tranquilizer darts,” said Erzurum, who is heading the search party.

Bears have no desire to attack people

Speaking to Anatolia News Agency, İsmail Menteş, The head of Kastamonu Environmental and Forest Management, said that under normal conditions, bears will run away from humans, and are not tempted to attack to people unless they feel threatened by them. Menteş emphasized the point that the brown bears that live in Anatolia do not attack people except in extraordinary situations, in a scientific report on “human-bear interactions.”

Menteş also points out that the bear is an animal whose reactions to life stressors can be similar to humans’, including depression due to food shortages or reproductive issues. Menteş said that as far as he knows, the bear population in Erzurum is not too large, but bears may enter areas where people live because of food shortages.

According to Menteş, bears that face a shortage of food in its own territory make seek out gardens and farms, take as much honey, fruit and vegetables as they need and immediately run away from the scene. They do not pose a threat unless they are threatened by people.

Assistant Professor Bülent Sağlam, from the forestry faculty at Artvin Çoruh University says that bears may seek fruit in human-populated areas as a result of people’s cutting down wild fruit trees in mountainous area. Talking to Anatolia News Agency, he said that understanding why bears enter villages is crucial. The main factor driving bears into populated areas is that they can’t find enough food in their natural habitat, which has been damaged by humans, according to Sağlam. “People have cut down the fruit trees in the forest due to a change in their legal status [fruit trees are not protected, as are some other wild trees]. Intervening in this way reduces the sources of food available for bears, and they begin to enter human living areas looking for fruit, which results in human-bear conflict,” he said, adding that under normal conditions, bears don’t attack people. The bear in the Erzurum incident may have been interrupted when it was trying to get food, according to Sağlam. “When the people saw the bear they may have reacted in a hostile manner out of fear, or the bear may have been frightened by meeting with humans. In either case, the bear could react in violent manner.”

Sağlam stresses that the bear which killed the two people in Erzurum must be eliminated to prevent further attacks, but a massacre of bears, using unreasonable force, should not be allowed. Any action against bears must be undertaken with the permission of the Ministry of Forests and Water and within a narrow scope.

Media coverage of bear attacks sounds alarm

The media coverage of the bear attacks in Erzurum’s İspir district sounds an alarm regarding the relationship between humans and animals in Turkey. Although Turkey has strong legal mechanisms in place to protect wildlife, the media discourse on the recent events has evidenced a strong anti-bear feeling, which must be subjected to scrutiny. The bear has been labeled a “killer,” “terrorist” and “murderer,” and the attack has been presented as the “bear terror in Erzurum,” which clearly could create a dangerous situation, if people respond to the media’s eager approval of violent retaliation against bears, even though most bears steer clear of human settlements.