Bruno, the brown bear that last month ambled from Italy to southern Germany, continues to confound the team of Bavarian animal experts tasked with capturing him.
Despite having the support of moose-hunting dogs specially shipped in from Finland, the chasers always seem to reach the places where the bear is sighted several hours after he has moved on. In the meantime, Bruno - a two-metre tall beast born in a northern Italian national park - keeps killing the smaller animals he finds in his path, including chickens, sheep, a rabbit and a guinea pig.
The Bavarian team, led by regional environmental expert Manfred Woefl, is afraid that Bruno could soon attack human beings. Woefl noted on Monday that recently the bear has increasingly been spotted in or near inhabited areas.
On Friday he was seen near a bar in the village of Kochel am See and later he was reported to have stopped for a rest outside the police station in Langgries. On Monday Bruno raided two henhouses, one of them near the village of Bad Kreuth, where several hundred people live.
After initially giving the go ahead to shoot the bear dead, Bavarian authorities were later persuaded by Italian environment ministry envoys to take a different approach. The objective now is to shoot the bear with a dart that will send it to sleep, so it can be transported back to Italy. The problem is that whenever the bear is sighted, he always moves on before the chasers get there.
The bear is believed to come from the Adamello-Brenta park in northern Italy. The park imported ten bears from Slovenia a few years ago in order to boost the Italian bear population. The roving Bruno, who experts badly want to identify with DNA testing, is thought to be the offspring of one of the imported Slovenian animals.
To get into Germany it wandered about 80 km from its home, passing through Austria and into the Oberammagau area of Bavaria. It was the first wild bear seen in the country for about 170 years.
