The population of bears in Europe has experienced a catastrophic decline over the last thousand years, followed by partial recovery — a process that mirrors the relationship between humans and the wild nature on the continent. Middle Ages abundance and the beginning of extermination At the beginning of the second millennium, the brown bear was a common inhabitant of almost all of Europe. These animals inhabited the territory from the Iberian Peninsula to the Ural Mountains and from Scandinavia to the Balkans. Back then, bears were an integral part of European forests, and their population was primarily determined by natural factors: the presence of a food base and suitable living territories. The turning point came with the active colonization of the land by humans. By the 17th-18th centuries, a systematic extermination of large predators began, which intensified in the 19th century. Bears were killed for several reasons: they were considered dangerous to livestock, they interfered with hunting more valuable animals, and also competed with humans for forest land. For example, in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha in the 19th century, bears were exterminated as competitors of the bison — the favorite game of the Russian nobility, as well as for the destruction of honey beehives with wild bees. Catastrophic decline in population By the end of the 19th — early 20th century, the situation had become critical. In Scandinavia, bears were almost completely exterminated: by 1930, there were only about 130 individuals left in several isolated mountainous areas in Sweden. In Norway, the bear had been almost exterminated by this time. In Estonia, the bear population reached a minimum in the 1920s, reducing to several dozen individuals hiding in the forests of Alutagузе and in the southern part of central Estonia. In Latvia, bears had also almost disappeared at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. The last bear in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha was killed in 1879, and the species disap ... Read more