Monday, June 26, 2006

A Sad Day for Sad Bears



I love the BBC News.... Here's a lovely little article on Bruno the Bear. My favorite line: "The shooting has happened. The bear is dead." Why do I find this both tragic and funny? It sounds like a line out of a Herzog movie--so German. And I can't help thinking about The World According to Garp and the story of the Viennese bears....


Bruno the bear shot dead in Alps

Wild bears once roamed widely across much of Europe
Hunters in the Bavarian Alps have shot dead a brown bear called Bruno after spending weeks trying to find it.

Earlier the German authorities had said the bear could be shot because it posed a danger to humans.

"The shooting has happened. The bear is dead," said Bavaria's government bear expert Manfred Woelfl. Hunters found it early on Monday near Spitzingsee.

The bear had been blamed for killing dozens of sheep. It had crossed the Alps into Germany from Italy in May.

In the German town of Kochel it had also raided a beehive and a rabbit hutch.

A pack of Finnish tracking dogs was brought in to capture Bruno alive, but they failed to corner it. The plan was to shoot the bear with a narcotic dart.

Bruno was the first wild bear to be sighted in Germany since 1835.

The animal was part of an Italian programme to reintroduce bears to the Alps.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

[German accent] Some people look at this bear and see a cute cuddly friend. I only see death and the cruel, arbitrary destruction of nature, which hates us.

kfd313 said...

Ha! Yes, thanks Werner! I mean Herr Herzog....

Jessica Smith said...

grr. if he was so hard to find...?
people are so stupid about bears and wolves. And so much of it is Germany's fault in the first place! (Grimms). What happened to a good old-fashioned shepherd keeping an eye on the sheep? Bears don't eat sheep. They eat mostly berries and sometimes fish. But a single brown bear is not going to be responsible for multiple sheep killings. Bears don't attack/eat large animals except under the most desperate circumstances.

Btw, when hiking, always use a bear canister.