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Italy captures brown bear that fatally mauled jogger Italy captures brown bear that fatally mauled jogger
(about 1 hour later)
Court previously suspended order to put down female brown bear after appeal by animal rights groupCourt previously suspended order to put down female brown bear after appeal by animal rights group
Authorities in northern Italy have captured a bear that fatally mauled a jogger and became the focus of a battle over what to do with the country’s growing brown bear population. A bear that killed a man while he was jogging in the woods close to a mountain village in northern Italy has been captured.
Officials in Trento announced on Tuesday that the bear, identified as Jj4, had been captured overnight. Authorities in Trento said the bear - a 17-year-old female identified as JJ4 - was captured overnight using a tube trap and taken to an enclosure in a wildlife park in Castellar.
Andrea Papi, 26, was killed during a mountain training run between 5-6 April. The Trento provincial authorities ordered that the bear be killed but an animal rights group appealed to an administrative court, which suspended the order on 11 April. Maurizo Fugatti, the president of the province whose order to have the animal put down was suspended by an administrative court last week, told a press conference “we wanted to shoot the bear during the capture”.
Jj4 is the same Alpine brown bear who injured a father and son out walking in the region in 2020. Then too, provincial authorities decided to kill her but a court blocked the move. Andrea Papi, 26, was mauled to death while out running on a path near his village of Caldes on 5 April. He was the first person in Italy to be killed in a bear attack in modern times.
She was born to two bears brought to Italy from Slovenia two decades ago as part of a European programme to repopulate the brown bear population that had been dwindling, which has now rebounded and is increasingly having close encounters with humans. Papi’s death pitted animal rights groups’ against Fugatti, whose previous order to kill JJ4 after it attacked two hikers, a father and son, in 2020 was cancelled by the administrative court.
Papi’s family had said they did not want the bear to be culled. The court is expected to decide on the issue on 11 May.
“If the court proves us to be right, the bear will be put down,” Fugatti said. “It is the news we would have liked to have given in 2020 following the attack against a father and son. There is bitterness about what has happened this time.”
Fugatti said he was preparing to issue orders for the culling of two other bears deemed to be dangerous - MJ5, which attacked a man in March, and M62.
JJ4 was born in Trento after mating between two bears that had been brought to Italy from Slovenia in the early 2000s through Life Ursus, a project aimed at reversing the area’s dwindling brown bear population.
There are now about 100 bears in the Trento area, and close encounters with humans are becoming more frequent.
Papi’s parents said they did not want JJ4 to be killed but that they want justice for their son. “It’s too easy to say he shouldn’t have been running there,” his mother told Rai 2. “The population didn’t know there were four problematic bears.”