A 26-year-old mountain runner has died after being attacked by a bear in Italy

A bear has killed a young mountain runner on a hiking trail located in the northeast of Italy, as reported by local authorities this Friday. It is a unprecedented factas it is the first such death the country records.

“Andrea Papi, 26, was jogging in a wooded and mountainous area, near the municipality of Caldes, in Trentino, South Tyrol, located in the northeastern region, when she came across the animal,” reads a Note.

After the autopsy performed on the body found, the investigators explained that “the victim was alive at the time of the surprise attack and he defended himself with his trekking polesFurthermore, they advanced that “DNA analysis will identify the type of bear that caused his death.

The young man had gone jogging last Wednesday. Worried that he would not return, his relatives asked the rescuers for help, who finally found his lifeless body in the early hours of Thursday.

“The traces of the encounter with the bear start from the village of Crocifisso, below Pra del Conz, at an altitude of 1,200 metres. Andrea ran down the forest path, but suddenly it took two laps, down the escarpment. The traces of blood and the scrambled weeds They continue for 150 meters, in an area that is impassable due to the crowding of branches, up to the trunk where we found it”. Fabio Angelimanager of the Forestry of Malè, one of the Italian municipalities in the province of Trento.

“I fell into a ravine, with deep wounds on the neck, arms and stomachsome of which were clearly caused by a carnivorous animal,” the news agency said AFP extension.

In the midst of the uproar caused by this death, the environmental NGO “World Wide Fund for Nature” (WWF, World Wide Fund for Nature) considered that “the bear that killed the hiker must be euthanized“.

Before this fatal episode, in March, a man was attacked by a bear not far from the same place, which led to debate on the dangers of these animals, numerous in that region.

“There have been attacks on farm animals in the last month, including a mutilated sheep outside the town of Caldes on March 19. There have been several attacks in the area. We just had to wait for one person to die,” he complained. a resident of the area.

Controversy over the presence of bears in Italy

Thanks to the “Life Ursus” project bears reintroduced in the autonomous province of Trento between 1996 and 2004. Already in 2021 some 69 copies in areas of said Italian territory.

“These facts happen and repeat themselves due to the absence of a preventive policy for this type of animal”, denounced Annamaria Procacci, spokeswoman for the National Animal Protection Association (Enpa),

“Man is not the bear’s prey. On the contrary, the bear is a particularly fearsome animal, which stays away from “man”, explained the ecologist, lamenting the lack of efforts to “discourage access to these areas, especially where there are bears with cubs”. .

It is estimated that there are between 120 and 200 bears throughout the Italian peninsula, mainly in Trentino and Abruzzo, two of the twenty regions that make up the Italian republic, but this is the first fatal accident officially recorded by the authorities.