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Of particular note is that there are a ton of bears in Romania, much more than in other European countries, with something like 60% of all European brown bears.

• nottorp 3y ago
  There are more bears than the land can sustain. Go to any tourist (or non tourist) spot in the mountains and they'll come down and steal from your garbage in town. Look up Brasov. It's a reasonably large touristic town and it regularly gets bears at the periphery.
  • larrik 3y ago
    I live in a regular town in Connecticut and I have bears attack my garbage regularly, so I'm not convinced that's all that weird.
    • miahi 3y ago
      Unfortunately, Romanian bears are brown bears (Ursus arctos), not black (Ursus americanus). They are not easily scared by people and encounters with them can be very dangerous.
      • bwanab 3y ago
        I understand the difference, but if you find yourself inadvertently getting between a black bear and her cubs, I think you'll find they can be very dangerous, also.
      • rsdfdfdfdf 3y ago
        I don't think there's a much difference in behavior between the species, probably Romania just has more bears living close to humans, which makes them less afraid and conflicts more likely. For the record, my home country (Finland) has about 2000 brown bears, and they have killed only a single person during past 100 years. Most of the time they try their best to avoid humans, and the majority of people living in the countryside have never even seen one.
        • lukan 3y ago
          Romania has more than 2 persons killed each year and many more injured. "Between 2016 and 2021, there were 154 bear attacks on humans, resulting in 158 injuries and 14 deaths" https://www.politico.eu/article/romania-bear-attacks-on-humans/ https://www.politico.eu/article/romania-bear-attacks-on-huma...
          • olddustytrail 3y ago
            Just for comparison, how many persons are killed by humans each year?
          • BodyCulture 3y ago
            There you have it! Romanian people taste much better than Finish!
          • Rinzler89 3y ago
            >Romania has more than 2 persons killed each year and many more injured. Statistics can be misleading without context. Especially when you see dumbfucks in Romania film themselves pulling over and get out of their cars so they can get close to bears to feed them biscuits and pet them as if they're stray cats/dogs. How can you blame the bears then? At that point such deaths are just natural selection at work. At least in the past when we were cavemen, some member of the tribe would get mauled by a wild animal and the rest of the tribe would take note not to fuck around with those animals and pass that knowledge to their offspring, but somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost commons sense and personal responsibility and if some idiot engages with a wild animal and gets killed it's now the animal's fault for being "dangerous" and not his fault for being a dumbass who's now been thankfully erased from the gene pool.
            • lukan 3y ago
              "At least in the past when we were cavemen, some member of the tribe would get mauled by a wild animal and the rest of the tribe would take note not to fuck around with those animals" Yes they learned, but also most tribes would have taken pride in hunting that animal down. At least that was (and is) the case with indigenous tribes where we have detail knowldege. So the animals learned to stay away from the humans (to some extent). But yes, we advanced a little bit, so we do have other options. The finns seem to do way better in this regard, than rumania. About the reasons why they do better, I lack detail knowledge. "Especially when you see dumbfucks in Romania film themselves pulling over and get out of their cars so they can get close to bears to feed them biscuits and pet them as if they're stray cats/dogs" But if this behavior is widespread, then yeah, this would be certainly a reason. And stray dogs can be quite dangerous as well btw.
      • larrik 3y ago
        Unlike the other commenters, I do agree that IS different. The black bears here are not on the same level as a grizzly or kodiak or other brown bear. The ones here ARE becoming a bit more aggressive for unknown reasons, though.
  • keiferski 3y ago
    I don't know much about the particular situation, but isn't it likely that is just caused from human settlements expanding?
    • hulitu 3y ago
      And habitat destruction. Romania _had_ a lot of forests.
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    Bears are common in western US mountain towns. The solution is being careful with garbage, including use of bear-proof containers. I'm not sure this is a sign of "too many" so much as that the bear population is healthy, meaning it's up against the carrying capacity, as a healthy population should be.
    • 1letterunixname 3y ago
      My mom lived in Paradise, CA. There was at least one black bear who roamed the neighborhood because it took a dump in the middle of her lawn to proclaim ownership of their land. According to neighbors, it didn't get into garbage containers there. There were red foxes, opossum, deer, and corvids to do that. In parts of rural, wooded America, you don't venture outside in situations where you could surprise a large animal without some sort of stabby weapon or firearm if you value your life (if they decide to charge) and that of critters (to try to scare them off).
  • Rinzler89 3y ago
    > they'll come down and steal from your garbage in town You mean their home? Bears were there before humans settled and built towns. IMHO can't really complain about bears wehen you're the on encroaching on their turf, not the other way around.
    • NikolaNovak 3y ago
      I never understand these arguments. You mean mastodon home,surely? They were there before bears! How about pterodactyl? How far do we go / where do we arbitrarily draw the line? I am all for ecology, preservation, being in sync with nature etc, but I find fundamentally flawed and dishonest arguments like these don't contribute to the cause. Over billions of years, every single species alive displaced some other species, multiple times over.
      • generic92034 3y ago
        > Over billions of years, every single species alive displaced some other species, multiple times over. I can mostly agree with the rest of your points. But how many species are killing off thousands of other species in such a short time frame?
        • NikolaNovak 3y ago
          And that's absolutely an argument I will support! and very much do care about. It's just a fundamentally different argument to "Well clearly, arbitrary species A here at some arbitrary time B is the natural and morally right owner of these lands".
          • generic92034 3y ago
            As long as this is not seen as justification to displace any other species just when we feel like it (because they probably displaced some other species), I can agree.
          • digging 3y ago
  • rickydroll 3y ago
    Speaking of bears, a bunch of libertarians took over Grafton NH, and the bears won. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...
  • exe34 3y ago
    Are you sure it's the bears that are invading or is it the monkeys with their stick technology?
  • vikramkr 3y ago
    The land can sustain them fine, that's just what it's like to live near bears. Tons of places are like that - you get used to it lol don't worry. There was a Tom Scott video on work folks are doing to develop bear resistant trash cans and the like: https://youtu.be/Xn_O2li_jpk?si=BUPxDOxXaOJdxC_v https://youtu.be/Xn_O2li_jpk?si=BUPxDOxXaOJdxC_v It's funny (and sad) that wildlife has been so thoroughly decimated in parts of the world that people are so shocked by such thoroughly mundane things but it's an important reminder that ecological restoration work must involve working with locals and understanding the cultural forces at play to make these projects a success. Including making sure that externalities are accounted for and that the people in the area share in the benefits (economic like tourism, cultural like restoration of culturally significant animals and ecosystems, environmental depending on the intrinsic value people give to preserving the environment, etc). I'm seeing it in the replies to this thread - it's easy for folks in places like the American West to be dismissive of concerns like these but the idea that the wild is worth preserving is frankly a relatively recent one. If you just assume that obviously everyone values bears being alive while the other person just assumes that everyone values eliminating or at least suppressing bear populations to never have to deal with them everyone is just going to walk away assuming the other person is crazy
    • mistrial9 3y ago
      > the idea that the wild is worth preserving is frankly a relatively recent one not entirely inaccurate, but an important distinction. People who had pre-industrial cultures (and probably some relationship to wild places) were systematically conquered and their lands taken, by militarized industrial civilizations.. this happened at various times in various places in the last 500 years. There are no places of note left that have not been treated this way. So a preservation relationship to wild places among the civilizations established by military conquer, is relatively new.. agree
      • vikramkr 3y ago
        Good point. The core of what i'm trying to get at with that statement is - in many of the regions where ecological restoration is a topic of conversation, stakeholders with power over restoration would only recently have begun to interact with the idea of ecological restoration being valuable in a way they have to take seriously (people have been fighting for the environment forever, but people with power to influence that caring about it is going to be novel), and are often coming from a perspective where the opposite, the exploitation of the environment as a desirable goal for mankind, has been mainstream for a long time.
  • seattle_spring 3y ago
    A bear stealing human food in no way shape or form suggests that there's not enough food for them in the wild. Stealing human food is just generally easier and tastier.
• ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
  > much more than in other European countries, with something like 60% of all European brown bears. There are about 5000 (even it it were 10,000) in Romania, which is way less than 50% of the european population. https://www.euronatur.org/en/what-we-do/bear-wolf-lynx/bears-in-europe/profile-brown-bear-ursus-arctos https://www.euronatur.org/en/what-we-do/bear-wolf-lynx/bears...
  • keiferski 3y ago
    I don't see any numbers in the link you provided. Edit: I looked again and I think you're referring to the image. It looks like the link I referenced was excluding Russia. Romania does seem to have 60% of bears everywhere in Europe west of Russia and parts of Finland and Estonia.
    • ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
      Romania has about 5000, Slovakia and Ukraine about 2000 about 4000 from Ex-Yugoslavia to Greece and 2500 in Scandinavia. So, still way less than 50%.
      • keiferski 3y ago
        I think the confusion might be because the Carpathian zone includes Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine, and the site I linked to is using that number solely for Romania. In any case, it's not my website and the general point remains that the specific region has a big percentage of European bears.
        • ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
          I didn't want to critisize you, just to get the numbers straight. I'm actually living in one of the regions with many bears (the northern end of the lower tatras) in Slovakia.