Within the last thousand years, the bear population in Europe has experienced a catastrophic decline, followed by a partial recovery — a process that mirrors the relationship between humans and the wild nature on the continent. Abundance in the Middle Ages 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 Urals and from Scandinavia to the Balkans. At that time, 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 areas. The turning point came with the active settlement of the land by humans. By the 17th-18th centuries, a planned extermination of large predators began, which intensified in the 19th century. Bears were killed for several reasons: they were considered dangerous to livestock, they hindered hunting for 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 beehives with wild bees' honey. Catastrophic decline in population By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 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 was almost destroyed by this time. In Estonia, the bear population reached a minimum in the 1920s, reducing to just a few dozen individuals hiding in the forests of Alutaguse and in the southern part of central Estonia. In Latvia, bears 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 ... Read more