A man has been seriously injured after being attacked by a brown bear on a hiking trail in Slovakia, a rescue spokeswoman told news agency TASR on Tuesday evening.
"We airlifted the 36-year-old patient with injuries to the neck area to hospital in Žilina by helicopter," the spokeswoman said. The incident occurred in the early evening on Tuesday in the village of Stráňavy, at the edge of a meadow bordering an adjacent forest.
On Wednesday morning, television channel TV Markíza reported further details. The man had suffered numerous injuries, mainly from bites, but was said to be in a stable condition. During the attack he reportedly also saw two young animals nearby. The attacker was therefore likely a mother bear that feared for her cubs.
The authorities called on the public to avoid the area if possible. A camera trap was also set up to quickly detect any reappearance of the bear.
More than 1,000 bears in Slovakia
According to the last official count published in 2022, there are around 1,200 brown bears living in the wild in Slovakia. The animals normally avoid people if they detect them in time. However, they can attack if encounters are unexpected or if a mother bear perceives a threat to her cubs. Individual confrontations in recent years have ended fatally.
