Wildlife Campaigners Condemn Sweden’s Bear Hunt as ‘Pure Slaughter’

Conservationists have condemned what they are calling the ‘pure slaughter’ of more than 150 brown bears in Sweden.

The country has a legal annual hunt of the animals and this year its government issued 486 shooting licences – equivalent to 20 per cent of the population of the creatures in the wild.

The 152 brown bears killed on the second day of the hunt follows a record-breaking 722 killed last year says Sweden’s Environmental Protection Agency.

As well as high numbers of licences, Sweden has relaxed its hunting regulations to allow the use of bait, cameras and dogs to kill the bears – practices that were previously illegal.

Barrels of food are used to attract the bears, and cameras send alerts when one appears. Hunters  then set their dogs on the animals to pin them down, before shooting them.

The event is becoming extremely controversial, and this year police patrols and drones accompanied hunters for the first time in anticipation of protests.

Magnus Orrebrant, chair of the Swedish Carnivore Association, a pro-wildlife advocacy group, said: ‘Modern hunting methods make it extremely easy to kill a bear – one could liken it to pure slaughter.

‘Bear hunting is very much about pure trophy hunt. Wildlife management in Sweden is about killing animals instead of preserving them.’

Bear Culling

Bears were hunted almost to extinction in Sweden a century ago, but numbers recovered to a peak of 3,300 in 2008. In the years since, the culls have cut bear numbers by 40 per cent to about 2,400.

If they continue at a similar rate, next year’s cull will bring numbers close to the minimum 1,400 bears considered necessary to maintain a viable population by the Swedish government.

Over the past two years, Sweden has culled hundreds of wolves, lynxes and bears. In 2023, the country held the largest wolf hunt in modern times, aiming to cull 75 of an endangered population of just 460 wolves.

Campaigners in neighouring Norway have protested about the hunting, saying it poses a danger to wildlife across the region.

Truls Gulowsen, head of the Norwegian Nature Conservation Organisation, said they were ‘very concerned with this culling’.

He said: ‘It’s a significant and quite dramatic reduction of the Scandinavian brown bear population. Now that Sweden is seriously decreasing its stock, it will impact the survivability of the entire Scandinavian population.’

Brown bears are a strictly protected species in Europe, and conservationists argue that the high hunting quotas could breach the European Union habitat directive, which prohibits ‘deliberate hunting or killing of strictly protected species’.

Under EU rules – and Sweden is a member country, although Norway isn’t – this prohibition can only be lifted as a ‘last resort’ to protect public safety, crops or natural flora and fauna.

Magnus Rydholm, communications director for the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management, said hunting was part of Sweden’s cultural heritage.

‘I would argue that northern Sweden would never have become habitable had it not been for hunting with free-running dogs. It is a cultural heritage, and a right, which we must protect,’ he said.

Conservation laws covering wolves and bears across the EU, have resulted in numbers recovering from the brink of extinction.

But now Sweden is among a number of European countries that have stepped up the hunting of large carnivores.

This year, Romania announced a cull of nearly 500 brown bears, despite their protected status. Germany is in the process of relaxing its rules on wolf hunting, and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has been part of a wider push to loosen protections for wolves.