Deep in the Transylvanian mountains, only a dozen or so miles from the edge of the old Hapsburg Empire where for centuries the foot-soldiers of Christian Europe skirmished with the Ottoman Turks, a new fight is underway.
The issue is no longer control of these storied lands – after centuries of fighting that was settled, at least for the foreseeable future, with the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 which wrested the region from Hungary and placed it at the heart of modern-day Romania.
Nor is it perhaps as consequential for the locals as some campaigns past. When the Tartars stormed in at the end of the 13th century they soaked the region in blood, killing nearly half of the residents of these valleys.
Then Nazis deported thousands of the region’s Jews during World War 2. When the Red Army arrived in late 1944 they brutalised whole villages and shipped many locals off to gulags and labour camps.
The Communists, who came to power on their coattails, ushered in half a century of human misery and architectural vandalism which only ended with the shooting of long-time leader and self-styled ‘Genius of the Carpathians’ Nicolae Ceausescu on Christmas Day 1989.
But, at least for the area’s estimated 8,000 brown bears – the largest population in Europe – the results of the current quarrel will be equally consequential.
At issue is whether these bears – who traditionally inhabited the mountainsides but have increasingly been drawn into the towns by rubbish on the streets, tourists who feed them from car windows, and back gardens laden with rotting fruit – will be protected or hunted.
The weapons of choice for this battle are not, of course, Magyar muskets, Turkish siege engines or Soviet political commissars. Instead they are Chinese-made electric fences, armoured Slovak rubbish bins, and hunting quotas set in Bucharest, 150 miles to the south.
And the battleground is no longer the high mountain passes but the febrile world of social media and the committee rooms of the Romanian parliament where, to hear it from the locals, envelopes of cash buy all sorts of favours.
Nevertheless a battle it is. And the lines have been drawn up.
Arrayed on one side of the divide are environmentalists, nature enthusiasts and most of the region’s large carnivore experts. They are armed with the knowledge that has come from decades of dealing with just such problems across North America’s mountain west.
On the other side are powerful hunting associations, local parliamentarians looking to stoke fear of the animals for their own purposes, and millennia of cultural antipathy towards the carnivores that share the land with us.
Tossed into the mix are the interests of a few entrepreneurs making a quick buck from tourists willing to pay to see a bear – even if the animal is seduced to show itself with a bucketful of maize – and a public that is growing worried about its own safety.
For nearly two decades now I have run Wild Bear Lodge where we pride ourselves on viewing completely natural bears. We don’t use bait, we don’t use hides, and we do most of our viewing on foot.
But as a Hungarian-speaker with a Transylvanian grandfather I have always been interested in the bears of Romania – which are genetically almost identical to the grizzlies of Western Canada that I know so well.
For years I have been pestered by some of my Hungarian friends – aware of, and sometimes irritated by, my ursine sympathies – who have told me that, whatever the reality in Canada the only way to control the bears of Transylvania is with a bullet.
“There are just too many of them,” I have been told. “They have overpopulated.”
Of course, I knew that could not be true. Bears, as any wildlife biologist worth their salt will tell you, have an internal mechanism which means that they only have as many cubs as the environment can provide for.
If they reach a point where there is not enough food – something scientists call carrying capacity – the females don’t put on enough fat and their bodies tell them to stop having cubs until such a time as the food becomes more plentiful.
Because of this ingenious biological brake on reproduction the bears themselves ensure there is a maximum amount of bears in any given area.
Despite this knowledge, and although I have spent nearly 20 years in the wilds and am well-versed in both bear behaviour and biology, I have always felt ill-equipped to hold forth about Romanian bears. I simply lacked on-the-ground experience.
And then finally, a few weeks ago, the place I teach at in Hungary – a tertiary education institution – asked if I wanted to give a talk on bear behaviour in Transylvania.
My fellow panelist would be Barna Tanczos, former Romanian environment minister, avid hunter, and leading proponent of the cull-the-bears campaign.
I agreed.
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