How the brown bear became public enemy number one in rural Romania

A year ago the technocrat environmental minister, Cristiana Pașca Palmer, brought in a law to make hunting bears illegal in Romania. She said that under European law “hunting for money was already illegal”, which seems to me undemocratic - why should countries not decide for themselves? The idea that hunting was acting to protect citizens from bears was, she claimed, just a cover for money making. 

Foreign conservationists across the world applauded. Romanians who lived in the countryside did not. A lot of Romanians have been killed or maimed by bears.

As a result a movement have sprung up, centring on the Szecklerland, the ethnic Hungarian region in the Carpathians, to make killing bears legal again. This article in the Guardian has the story (seen from the NGO, not the peasant, point of view).

In the 12 months since the ban, a movement calling for the widespread culling of bears has grown and gathered momentum, tipping the bear question over
from political discussion into what the movement’s leader, Csaba Borboly, describes as “something like a war.” Borboly is president of Harghita county, a predominantly ethnic Hungarian region tucked into the foothills of Transylvania, an area of dense forest and precarious farmland in which people and carnivores have coexisted uneasily for centuries. It is here that the presence of bears is most keenly felt – almost everyone has a story to tell about the animals, from the woman who explains how in spring this year she woke up in the night to find a 200kg brown bear sniffing around her toilet, to the hundreds of farmers who approach the government each year for compensation over lost livestock and crops.

A British Green friend of mine and I were just discussing this and I said I'd happily kill a lot of bears to save one human life. 'I wouldn't.' It turns out he thinks a bear life and a human life are of equal value.  He worries about Nazis and emphatically does NOT worry about abortion.

I wonder how many British people agree with him and know several left-wing women who do.


A lot of left wing friends think they are being progressive when they say that animals are of as much value as humans. They have in mind bears and giraffes, not rats. I think this attitude is very wicked. It is found on the far right too. That fat old man Goering cried whenever one of his dogs died.



John Aspinall, the incredibly right-wing gambler and zoo owner, was one of many who worried about overpopulation while saying things like 

The extinction of animals and plant species and the depletion of non-renewable resources are irremediable crimes.

Sir David Attenborough and many other zoologists feel the same way.

The same people almost always worry about climate change and often urge Europeans to have fewer children. Before the Nazis made the idea unfashionable, they would have been eugenicists. 

In England people have become very opposed to hunting, especially hunting foxes which is now illegal, though in America they are not. Opposing cruelty to animals is a good thing, but it can go to far. Hunting requires many traditional virtues and was until fairly recently admired.  Read descriptions of hunts in Tolstoy, Turgenev, Trollope and Ernest Hemingway.

Sentimentality about animals is a bad thing when it means lack of respect for human beings (think African villagers who fear attacks by lions) - and for hierarchy (the hierarchy in the universe that places man above brute) - and for reason (men have it, animals don't). 

This sort of sentimentality seems to me to be linked with the urbanisation, feminisation and, most of all, secularisation of Western societies. People care about animal lives who are in favour of abortion and euthanasia.

How many bears would I kill to save one human life? I think there is no upper limit. Do you agree? 

If I were to say 'to save one child's life' does that make a difference?