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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

There are more bears than the land can sustain. Go to any tourist (or non tourist) spot in the mountains and they'll come down and steal from your garbage in town.

Look up Brasov. It's a reasonably large touristic town and it regularly gets bears at the periphery.

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Bears are common in western US mountain towns. The solution is being careful with garbage, including use of bear-proof containers.

I'm not sure this is a sign of "too many" so much as that the bear population is healthy, meaning it's up against the carrying capacity, as a healthy population should be.

My mom lived in Paradise, CA. There was at least one black bear who roamed the neighborhood because it took a dump in the middle of her lawn to proclaim ownership of their land. According to neighbors, it didn't get into garbage containers there. There were red foxes, opossum, deer, and corvids to do that.

In parts of rural, wooded America, you don't venture outside in situations where you could surprise a large animal without some sort of stabby weapon or firearm if you value your life (if they decide to charge) and that of critters (to try to scare them off).

The land can sustain them fine, that's just what it's like to live near bears. Tons of places are like that - you get used to it lol don't worry. There was a Tom Scott video on work folks are doing to develop bear resistant trash cans and the like: https://youtu.be/Xn_O2li_jpk?si=BUPxDOxXaOJdxC_v

It's funny (and sad) that wildlife has been so thoroughly decimated in parts of the world that people are so shocked by such thoroughly mundane things but it's an important reminder that ecological restoration work must involve working with locals and understanding the cultural forces at play to make these projects a success. Including making sure that externalities are accounted for and that the people in the area share in the benefits (economic like tourism, cultural like restoration of culturally significant animals and ecosystems, environmental depending on the intrinsic value people give to preserving the environment, etc). I'm seeing it in the replies to this thread - it's easy for folks in places like the American West to be dismissive of concerns like these but the idea that the wild is worth preserving is frankly a relatively recent one. If you just assume that obviously everyone values bears being alive while the other person just assumes that everyone values eliminating or at least suppressing bear populations to never have to deal with them everyone is just going to walk away assuming the other person is crazy

> the idea that the wild is worth preserving is frankly a relatively recent one

not entirely inaccurate, but an important distinction. People who had pre-industrial cultures (and probably some relationship to wild places) were systematically conquered and their lands taken, by militarized industrial civilizations.. this happened at various times in various places in the last 500 years. There are no places of note left that have not been treated this way.

So a preservation relationship to wild places among the civilizations established by military conquer, is relatively new.. agree

Good point. The core of what i'm trying to get at with that statement is - in many of the regions where ecological restoration is a topic of conversation, stakeholders with power over restoration would only recently have begun to interact with the idea of ecological restoration being valuable in a way they have to take seriously (people have been fighting for the environment forever, but people with power to influence that caring about it is going to be novel), and are often coming from a perspective where the opposite, the exploitation of the environment as a desirable goal for mankind, has been mainstream for a long time.

I live in a regular town in Connecticut and I have bears attack my garbage regularly, so I'm not convinced that's all that weird.

Unfortunately, Romanian bears are brown bears (Ursus arctos), not black (Ursus americanus). They are not easily scared by people and encounters with them can be very dangerous.

I understand the difference, but if you find yourself inadvertently getting between a black bear and her cubs, I think you'll find they can be very dangerous, also.

I don't think there's a much difference in behavior between the species, probably Romania just has more bears living close to humans, which makes them less afraid and conflicts more likely. For the record, my home country (Finland) has about 2000 brown bears, and they have killed only a single person during past 100 years. Most of the time they try their best to avoid humans, and the majority of people living in the countryside have never even seen one.

Romania has more than 2 persons killed each year and many more injured.

"Between 2016 and 2021, there were 154 bear attacks on humans, resulting in 158 injuries and 14 deaths"

https://www.politico.eu/article/romania-bear-attacks-on-huma...

Just for comparison, how many persons are killed by humans each year?

There you have it! Romanian people taste much better than Finish!

>Romania has more than 2 persons killed each year and many more injured.

Statistics can be misleading without context. Especially when you see dumbfucks in Romania film themselves pulling over and get out of their cars so they can get close to bears to feed them biscuits and pet them as if they're stray cats/dogs. How can you blame the bears then? At that point such deaths are just natural selection at work.

At least in the past when we were cavemen, some member of the tribe would get mauled by a wild animal and the rest of the tribe would take note not to fuck around with those animals and pass that knowledge to their offspring, but somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost commons sense and personal responsibility and if some idiot engages with a wild animal and gets killed it's now the animal's fault for being "dangerous" and not his fault for being a dumbass who's now been thankfully erased from the gene pool.

"At least in the past when we were cavemen, some member of the tribe would get mauled by a wild animal and the rest of the tribe would take note not to fuck around with those animals"

Yes they learned, but also most tribes would have taken pride in hunting that animal down. At least that was (and is) the case with indigenous tribes where we have detail knowldege. So the animals learned to stay away from the humans (to some extent).

But yes, we advanced a little bit, so we do have other options. The finns seem to do way better in this regard, than rumania. About the reasons why they do better, I lack detail knowledge.

"Especially when you see dumbfucks in Romania film themselves pulling over and get out of their cars so they can get close to bears to feed them biscuits and pet them as if they're stray cats/dogs"

But if this behavior is widespread, then yeah, this would be certainly a reason. And stray dogs can be quite dangerous as well btw.

I bet that a fair quote of them were hunting bears

Eurasian brown bears and North American brown bears are ostensibly the same species of bear, but you'd never guess it from the attack statistics. Eurasian brown bears are considerably less likely to attack than their North American counterparts. I think the Eurasian brown bears have been subjected to more evolutionary pressure to be more docile (from people hunting down the aggressive ones more comprehensively and probably for longer than in America.)

Unlike the other commenters, I do agree that IS different. The black bears here are not on the same level as a grizzly or kodiak or other brown bear. The ones here ARE becoming a bit more aggressive for unknown reasons, though.

I don't know much about the particular situation, but isn't it likely that is just caused from human settlements expanding?

And habitat destruction. Romania _had_ a lot of forests.

Speaking of bears, a bunch of libertarians took over Grafton NH, and the bears won.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

Are you sure it's the bears that are invading or is it the monkeys with their stick technology?

A bear stealing human food in no way shape or form suggests that there's not enough food for them in the wild. Stealing human food is just generally easier and tastier.

> they'll come down and steal from your garbage in town

You mean their home? Bears were there before humans settled and built towns.

IMHO can't really complain about bears wehen you're the on encroaching on their turf, not the other way around.

I never understand these arguments.

You mean mastodon home,surely? They were there before bears! How about pterodactyl?

How far do we go / where do we arbitrarily draw the line?

I am all for ecology, preservation, being in sync with nature etc, but I find fundamentally flawed and dishonest arguments like these don't contribute to the cause. Over billions of years, every single species alive displaced some other species, multiple times over.

> Over billions of years, every single species alive displaced some other species, multiple times over.

I can mostly agree with the rest of your points. But how many species are killing off thousands of other species in such a short time frame?

And that's absolutely an argument I will support! and very much do care about.

It's just a fundamentally different argument to "Well clearly, arbitrary species A here at some arbitrary time B is the natural and morally right owner of these lands".

As long as this is not seen as justification to displace any other species just when we feel like it (because they probably displaced some other species), I can agree.

Were bears completely extinct in the area and reintroduced from elsewhere? If not, there's no arbitrary line being drawn whatsoever. It's currently bear habitat.

> "Well clearly, arbitrary species A here at some arbitrary time B is the natural and morally right owner of these lands".

Which is not what the person you replied to said. I read it as "bears were there first, don't be surprised when you move there and find bears".

I think he's just saying that if you move in somewhere where there were lots of bears.... don't be surprised when bears show up and are annoying.

This. I just said humans should not complain about bear issues when they settle in bear territory. Don't know why others need to get their knickers in a twist.

The "surprise“ comes from the fact this was historically a solved problem. People simply killed the annoying predators and nuisance animals.

We are in a transition state of cultural values and expectations. People expect to being free from annoyances because that was the norm for hundreds if not thousands of years. The rules have changed around how we treat animals, but people have not internalized all the resulting impacts.

For what it is worth, there are still lots of places, even in the US, where the old solution is still in effect.

Historically there were much less humans, and more wilderness for animals. Applying the historical solutions in modern day would mean extinction of species in many places.

That may be true for some species, and not others. However, I was not attempting an appeal to history, just providing explanation. After all, historically, most people did not care about the extinction of many species, or even thought their eradication was a benefit.

While I’d probably vote to shoo the bears, I don’t think the argument is particularly hard to understand.

Like the folks who build their house at the bottom of a flood plain or fire area and then demand help for ensuing disaster.

The point of this argument is to compare humans with animals they replaced, not animals with other animals, because the assumption is that we, as humans, are ethically capable of engaging with this kind of question in the first place. I don't think anyone is arguing that "the land belongs to the bears and no one else."

> where do we arbitrarily draw the line?

clearly, a line is if both species are alive at the same time and competing for resources. we don't have do be moronic/sophomoric about the discourse.

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