Recently, bears have been coming down to the city streets in Kupres more and more often in the evenings, which is why the residents of that municipality have asked the authorities to solve the problem urgently.
Before they started coming down to the city, the bears were in search of food, they came to the suburbs where they destroyed beehives, which destroyed dozens of beehives of the Kupres OPG residents.
The president of the hunting association “Orlov kuk” from Tomislavgrad, Mate Buntić, reminded in an interview for Fena that the ban on brown bear hunting in FBiH has been in force for fifteen years, and the reasons for the ban are, first of all, that until recently the breeding areas were not defined, which is why , as he says, could not begin the process of developing brown bear management plans.
“At the beginning of this year, the brown bear breeding areas in FBiH were defined, which are the borders of the counties, that is, each county represents its own breeding area. After that, the users of the hunting grounds in Canton 10 began to develop a management plan for each individual hunting ground. The plans are based on realistic assessment of the number of brown bears, and the development plan is finished and now we have to wait for its acceptance at the cantonal and federal level,” Buntić pointed out.
When the plan is approved, he adds, the conditions are met for the legal shooting of the brown bear, which according to the FBiH Hunting Law is protected by a hunting license, i.e. there is a specific time of the year when it is allowed to hunt and how it is allowed to hunt.
“Unfortunately, in the past period, the users of the hunting ground could not hunt the mentioned species of game, for which they often had to pay compensation for the damage that this game caused to apiaries, agricultural crops and livestock. To make matters even more illogical, in the Republic of Srpska you can hunt the brown bear it turns out that hunters in FBiH feed and keep, and hunters in RS harvest the finished product in the border areas of RS and FBiH, because game knows no borders,” Buntić asserted.
According to him, recently there has been information about the increased presence of brown bears near settlements and even in the settlements themselves.
There are many reasons, and one of them is the increase in the brown bear population due to the ban on hunting in the FBiH, notes Buntić.
He adds that another reason is the lack of food in the hunting grounds due to certain weather conditions.
“If we recall the heavy rains in spring, it is clear to us that excessive moisture affected the reduced yield of forest fruits (blueberries, raspberries, bran, etc.). One of the factors is the human presence in the bear’s habitat, whether it is intensive logging forests or excessive noise produced not only by forest users, but also uncontrolled driving of quad vehicles, motorbikes, off-road vehicles on hunting grounds as a form of recreation, but unfortunately with negative consequences,” Buntić stressed.
He also assessed that every game likes peace in the hunting grounds, including the brown bear.
“Finally, we have to consider one more factor, which is the absence of bringing sufficient quantities of food to the hunting ground, which would satisfy the minimal needs of animals for food, including the brown bear, in times of natural scarcity. The easiest thing to do in all of this is to blame the hunters. We are powerless as for the problems caused by the brown bear”, said Buntić, who hopes to solve this and other problems in the field of hunting and game management, Fena reports.
