Future of killer bear that attacked jogger in Italian countryside finally decided

The fierce legal debate over a bear that killed a jogger in the Italian Alps last year is set to come to an end.

The female Alpin Brown bear will now be relocated to a sanctuary in Germany, authorities from the northern Italian province of Trento said on Tuesday.

After the bear, known as JJ4, fatally attacked a 26-year-old man in April 2023, Trento administrators issued an order for its capture and execution. The death sentence was blocked by legal challenges from environmentalists.

“JJ4 will be transferred by the autumn,” Trento’s tourism and hunting councillor Roberto Failoni told local daily Corriere del Trentino, adding it would find a new home at the Worbis Alternative Bear Park in the central German state of Thuringia.

The decision came after the animal rights group LAV said it had secured access to medical bulletins showing that JJ4 and another bear were being held in captivity in the Trento province in a “severe state of stress.”

Failoni denied this was the case.

The area around the city of Trento, which was re-populated with bears from 1999 under an EU-funded programme, has seen several bear attacks in recent years, raising questions about how to achieve successful cohabitation with the animals.

JJ4 is the same Alpine brown bear that injured a father and son out walking in the region in 2020. Then too, Trento provincial authorities ordered her killed but a court blocked the move.

She is the sister of two other brown bears that have been ordered killed in recent years because of their aggressive behavior, including “Bruno,” or JJ1, who was killed after he crossed into Germany in 2005, and JJ3, killed by Swiss authorities in the canton of Grigioni in 2008, Italian news reports said.

Trento’s provincial president, Maurizio Fugatti, previously expressed anger that Mr Papi’s death could have been avoided if JJ4 had been euthanized after her first dangerous encounter with humans in 2020.

He denounced as “ideological” the arguments by animal rights groups that have opposed selective euthanasia for bears known to be aggressive, like JJ4.

European Union-funded Life Ursus project – aimed at increasing the Alpine brown bear population which was once nearly extinct – began in 1999 with the introduction of three males and six female bears into the Trento forests. The project had the intention of rebuilding the population to 40-60 bears over a few decades.

But the project has worked too well, and the population has rebounded to more than 100 identified bears, which are increasingly encountering the human population, according to Italian media.