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Environmental NGOs have accused a prince from the Liechtenstein royal family of shooting Romania’s largest bear in an act of trophy hunting.
Romania’s Agent Green and Austrian group VGT said in a joint statement published Wednesday that Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein visited Romania in March this year and killed a 17-year-old brown bear on a protected nature reserve.
According to the NGOs, the prince, who lives in Austria, came to Romania under the pretense of shooting a female bear for which the Romanian government had issued a special hunting derogation. The female was disturbing locals in a village in a nature-protection site in the Carpathian mountains.
However, the bear the prince shot was a male nicknamed Arthur that had been under observation by an Agent Green ranger and had always kept away from the villagers, the NGOs said.
“It is clear that the prince did not come to solve the problem of the locals, but to kill the bear and take home the biggest trophy to hang it on the wall. We are dealing with a game of poaching, since they shot the wrong bear,” said Agent Green President Gabriel Paun in his statement.
Romanian Prime Minister Florin Cîțu appeared to downplay the issue in an interview with national media on Wednesday, saying, “It looks like it’s not the biggest bear.” He added that not all the information circulating in public was correct and that there would be an investigation into the bear’s killing.
The Associated Press reported it had seen documentation showing the prince paid the equivalent of €7,000 to obtain a four-day hunting permit.
Brown bears are protected from deliberate hunting under the EU habitats directive and derogations can be granted only under special circumstances, such as if the animal is putting the public or other wildlife in danger.
“Romania has consistently violated Community legislation in this area since joining the EU by setting harvest and derogation quotas without ever implementing coexistence and co-adaptation measures,” the groups wrote in their statement.
Asked whether Arthur really was the biggest bear living in Romania or even in the EU, as the NGOs had claimed, Ann-Kathrin Freude from VGT said, “We can’t really measure the heights of all the bears, but the indication we have is the trophy score. You can have 600 points for the best bears you could possibly collect, and he has 592.8 points. It is the highest number ever recorded in trophy hunting, so it might very well be the biggest bear.”
She added, “It’s a great problem that rich people actually all over the world still do trophy hunting as a social activity.”
POLITICO contacted the prince for a response on Wednesday evening but did not receive an answer. The Swiss newspaper Blick reported him as saying, “Personally, I do not want to get involved in the discussion in any way.”
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