By Andrew Osborn
MOSCOW, Sept 25 (Reuters) – A Russian woman has been fatally mauled by a bear in her garden, the seventh such death in her Siberian region this month, state investigators said, amid a nationwide spate of killings that experts blame on climate change and human incompetence.
A video released by investigators in Siberia’s Krasnoyarsk region some 3,000 km (1,864 miles) east of Moscow showed them walking through a wooded area and inspecting the corpse of the brown bear which carried out the attack.
The state TASS news agency said the bear had killed the 51-year-old woman in the village of Voznesenka after she saw the creature trying to get into a pen in her garden where she kept domestic animals.
“The bear lunged at the woman. The predator was shot dead by a neighbour of the deceased,” TASS reported.
Experts cited in Russian media said that bears — which have attacked humans in at least 11 regions across Russia this year and killed at least 20 people — have been forced to look further afield for food this year because an early and dry spring meant there was a lack of berries for them to feed on in September.
People are also guilty of leaving food waste out in the open where it attracts bears and of ignoring safety rules, the experts said, while in at least one region the authorities stand accused of failing to keep bear numbers down.
BEAR POPULATION HAS RISEN SHARPLY
Shorter and milder winters, among other factors, have seen bear numbers more than double from 130,000 in 1990.
Investigators in Krasnoyarsk, home to nearly 27,000 of Russia’s 308,000 brown bears according to environment ministry data, said on Wednesday they had opened a criminal case into the local environment ministry, accusing it of negligence that led to the deaths of six people — now seven, including the woman in her garden — in the region in September alone.
It said the ministry and other agencies had a responsibility to monitor and control the bear population and act promptly if people’s lives were at risk.
“Despite numerous warnings of danger, officials from the ministry and other authorised officials failed to take measures to regulate the predator population and prevent their appearance in areas inhabited by people,” investigators said in a statement.
“Monitoring data show that the brown bear population in the Krasnoyarsk region has increased 2.5-fold, reaching over 26,000 animals. Residents… have submitted more than 120 reports of brown bears entering the boundaries of settlements in more than 15 districts of the region, as well as in the cities of Krasnoyarsk, Zheleznogorsk and Zelenogorsk,” they said.
Investigators warned people to avoid visiting forests and to postpone any plans to go mushroom and berry picking in the woods, a popular Russian pastime.
“If you encounter a large predator, you have virtually no chance of survival,” the statement said.
Other people killed by bears in the Krasnoyarsk region this month include a 39-year-old male logger and two women out picking mushrooms.
OTHER REGIONS ALSO AFFECTED
In Siberia’s Irkutsk region, a male pensioner who also went out mushroom picking was killed by a bear this month as were two men gathering wild plants in a forest.
In one of the most high-profile attacks this year, a bear attacked two tourists in their tent in the Altai region in August. It dragged one of the tourists, a 29-year-old woman, out of the tent, killed her, and then buried her in the forest.
And in the Siberian region of Tuva, ice hockey coach Alexander Kuzmenko — father of NHL player Andrei Kuzmenko — was killed this week by a bear while on a fishing trip.
The environment ministry has sought to play down the spate of attacks.
“In recent years, around 20 to 30 cases of bear attacks have been recorded annually,” it told the RBC news outlet.
“The only abnormal spike was in 2014, when there were 166 cases. The thing is, nowadays everyone has a smartphone, and information spreads quickly via the internet and social media, which creates the impression that the problem is widespread.”
(Reporting by Andrew Osborn Editing by Gareth Jones)
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