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Bear escapes German dragnet, Austria gives shoot-to-kill order |
REGENSBURG, Germany: Foresters hunted in vain yesterday for the first bear to prowl German soil in 170 years and concluded that the fast-moving animal may have fled back to Austria, where there is also an order to shoot it on sight.
Lumbering 20km a day, the brown bear has raided flocks of sheep and a hen-run since straying across the mountainous border last week. German authorities say the animal has become so bold that it may attack people if cornered, so it must be stopped.
Animal-rights activists angrily criticised the “death penalty”. But zoos said they had no use for a wild bear. Experts said even a safari park would be a cruel end for a roaming beast of prey.
Austria also authorised hunters yesterday to shoot the bear because it had overcome its natural dislike of human habitations.
Joachim Kessler, a spokesman for the Bavarian Forest Service, said no fresh tracks of the bear, dubbed JJ2, had been found yesterday.
Foresters would only shoot it if they could not trap the bear in an aluminium tube.
“It’s probably gone back to Austria,” he said after the search in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen area, close to the Zuegspitze, Germany’s highest mountain. The bear has mauled 11 sheep.
Bears are extinct in most of Europe except Russia and the Carpathian Mountains. Austria has just 30.
Amid the outcry, Catholic officials jokingly suggested yesterday that there is papal authority for the right of bears to live in Bavaria.
Diocese of Munich spokesman Winfried Roehmel pointed out that Pope Benedict XVI, who is German, has a bear on his coat of arms, representing a bear that assisted an 8th century Bavarian bishop, St Corbinian. – DPA |
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