Should Italy’s killer bear be sentenced to death?

The female bear that mauled to death a male jogger in the Italian Alps on 5th April was captured this week.

Twenty-six-year-old Andrea Papi’s ravaged corpse was naked when found. His shirt and shorts lay many yards away. The killer bear, known as JJ4, is a 17-year-old mother of three cubs and the off-spring of two of the ten brown bears brought from Slovenia to the Trentino region of north east Italy in 1999-2000 under an EU rewilding scheme called Life Ursus.

JJ4 was identified as the killer from a DNA match. Two weeks later forestry police captured her after following her tracks in the snow and setting up a tubular bear trap baited with apples coated with honey.

The tragedy prompts two essential questions: should this killer bear be put down? And should such lethally dangerous animals be reintroduced into our countryside, and allowed to breed in an uncontrolled manner?

The answer to the first question is no, probably not, though it is tricky.