Italian animal rights groups have called upon the Swiss authorities to safeguard the fate of a brown bear whose more famous brother Bruno was shot in Germany in 2006.
The European brown bear, JJ3, was born in the Adamello-Brenta national park in Trentino as part of a five-year project to reintroduce bears into one of their traditional habitats.
But, like his brother, JJ3 wandered out of northern Italy and has been roaming around the Swiss canton of Grigioni for around a year, upsetting local hunters who say they can no longer go into the woods without worry.
The Swiss authorities have labelled JJ3 ''problematic'' since he shows no fear of humans, and animal rights groups fear that the elimination of the bear will be the next step.
''We cannot accept that the wildlife bureaucrats decide, on the base of simplistic preventative evaluations, whether wonderful animals like JJ3 should live or die,'' said Massimo Vitturi, head of the hunting and wildlife section of LAV.
Vitturi appealed to the Swiss ambassador in Rome and asked that JJ3 be moved to an isolated area far away from people rather than suffer the same fate as his brother.
Two-year-old Bruno was shot dead by Bavarian hunters in June 2006 after he ambled into Germany - the first of his species to be seen there in 170 years.
His arrival in Bavaria initially caused excitement but when he started killing sheep and chickens local farmers became alarmed.
Bavarian officials decided he was a danger to humans, especially after he began to prowl around inhabited areas, and gave permission for him to be killed, ignoring pleas from Italian Environment Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio to shoot Bruno with a tranquiliser dart and bring him back to Italy.
Bruno was stuffed and is now on show in the German natural history museum in Nymphenberg.
Both Bruno and JJ3 are the offspring of Jurka, a female brown bear who was among ten animals imported from Slovenia to Trentino as part of the ''Life Ursus'' conservation project to protect the nation's population of European brown bears in Alpine regions of northern Italy.
Further outraging animal rights groups, Jurka has spent the last year inside an electric-fenced enclosure in Trentino after she too caused problems by ambling too close to inhabited areas and attempting to enter houses to get food.
Experts suspect that her cubs may have learnt their wandering ways from their 130-kg mother, who was sterilized in October to prevent wild bears from breaking into her enclosure to mate.
In October Italy suffered a setback to another conservation project after three Marsican bears - a subspecies of the brown bear that lives exclusively in the central Italian Apennine mountains - were found poisoned.
According to the Italian forestry corps, only 40-50 Marsican bears remain in the wild.
