Sweden begins brown bear hunting season with conservationists warning of a 20% drop in number

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Brown bear hunting in Sweden started Wednesday with 486 licenses to kill them, but conservationists warned that the move would result in a 20% drop in the country’s predator population.

“Bear hunting is very much about pure trophy hunt,” Magnus Orrebrant of the Swedish Carnivore Association — a non-profit and independent advocacy group — told The Associated Press.

“Wildlife management in Sweden is about killing animals instead of preserving them,” he added.

In June, when the figure for this year’s bear hunting was released, Jonas Kindberg of a Swedish-Norwegian bear preservation research program said that “if you want the population to remain stable at around the 2,400 animals as we estimate today, you can only shoot about 250 bears annually.”

It “can quickly have major consequences that could become critical for the bear population,” he added.

In Sweden, the number of bears has dropped in recent years chiefly due to the expected effect of licensed hunting in recent years, according to officials. Last year’s license to cull them was record-high at 649, while it was 622 in 2022 and 501 in 2021.

Every five years, an estimate is made of how many bears there are in Sweden. The previous estimated count was done in 2017 which showed there were about 2,900 bears at that time, according to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, a government body.

The assessment is that the number of carnivoran mammals increased slightly between 2018 and 2020, and then decreased, the agency said.

The Swedish hunters’ magazine Svensk Jagt told its readers that “the bear, like other large predators, may only be hunted under strictly controlled conditions.”

Sweden is covered by 70% of forest and the seven counties inhabited by bears issue a limited number of licenses to cull them each year.

The hunting season for the carnivoran mammals in 2024 ends at the latest on Oct. 15. The counties are chiefly located in central and northern Sweden.

The magazine also wrote that the county of Varmland, west of Stockholm, closed the 2024 bear hunting season Wednesday, shortly after three bears it had been allocated, had been culled.

Besides the hunting licenses, bears can also be killed in self-defense when people are threatened, and these are not counted as part of the hunting licenses.

Female bears weigh 60-100 kilograms (132-220 pounds) while males weigh 100-250 kilograms (220-551 pounds) and they have a shoulder height of up to 135 centimeters (53 inches).

Bears roam the Scandinavian peninsula. Sweden has a 1,600-kilometer (994-mile) border with Norway where bear hunting is forbidden.