Romanians have a lot of problems, some of them much more pressing than the one I am going to discuss here, but this one has seen the headlines in the past few weeks, so what can I say, I'm gonna indulge this time around. As far as what the press covers, I honestly do not know whether this is anti-bear/pro-hunting propaganda or whether the situation is genuinely out of control. It could be that both framings are true: on one hand, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that hunter associations are trying to push some sort of lobby in the parliament, since I've seen for example some posts on old Năstase's blog; while on the other, the confluence between late spring, the end of the hibernation season and the beginning of the holiday season have led me to first-hand accounts of friends seeing bears in their near vicinity around Bușteni and Brașov.
As far as the causes behind this problem go, there are at least a couple of them. The first cause is comprised of a bunch of anti-poaching laws set to protect the Romanian bear population. For what it's worth, my own bias goes towards welcoming these laws, the main reason behind it being that Romanians are by ang large very stupid, and in their stupidity they tend to ruin the places they inhabit. So what I mean is that I welcome the process of natural selection which keeps them away from the woods and mountains that they're otherwise set to pollute with their filth. Now go ahead and change my mind. Sure, the shepherds are collateral victims in this game, but I don't know if you've ever seen a Carpathian shepherd dog -- they're large and yes, they can scare a bear away, which more or less settles this particular issue.
The second cause behind the Romanian bear problem is the ongoing process of deforestation that has been going on, say, during covid, while almost everyone except some NGOs were shutting up on the subject. The result was that the growing population of bears were less able to find food near their home and, although they didn't like humans, they resorted to going downstream into human settlements in search for food. By the way, check out this photo taken on a ten minutes' walk from Tâmpa, in Brașov:
My general opinion of Brașovians was that they're good people, but goddammit some of them are dum{b,p} fucks. Sure, if you leave your garbage out in the open, a bear is going to sniff that and he or she -- and if it's a she, she'll likely have one or two cubs following her, which puts her into alert mode and makes her more likely to maim you -- will go downtown for dinner. And between the bear on one side and the Brașovian on the other, I really can't blame the animal; although one might even wonder which one is the more evolved creature among the two.
Two decades ago Bucharest had a stray dog problem, and the unfortunate solution then was to exterminate the poor dogs. Now, we can't properly call bears strays, since they don't live in either Brașov or Bușteni; but all the same, killing was always the unfortunate(ly easy) approach to solving this kind of thing, at least ever since people started holding gunpowder. At least it's a simple solution, although I'm pretty sure it will irk some NGOs and it's going to stir the usual shit public-debatery that tends to lead nowhere. But short of relocating bears over to the Black Forest or whatever barren woods Western Europeans tend to host nowadays, I don't see any other way to put an end to this.