Prince under investigation for 'poaching' one of biggest bears in Romania
Romanian police are investigating a Liechtenstein prince for poaching after he killed a huge male bear described as the "biggest male living deep in the wild" on a hunting trip to the Carpathian mountains.
Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein, who lives in Austria, was granted a four-day hunting permit in March in Romania's Covasna County, official hunting documents revealed.
The papers said the aristocrat “harvested” a 17 year-old brown bear called Arthur on the hunt. He paid just over £6,000 for the trophy but reports alleged the animal was “wrongly” killed.
Due to Arthur the brown bear's large size, it was considered in hunting parlance a "Golden" trophy, prized specimens which can fetch more than £17,000.
Repeated attempts to contact the prince's estate were unsuccessful. Switzerland's Blick newspaper quoted the prince as saying he wouldn't comment on the matter.
Romania, which is home to Europe's biggest population of brown bears, banned trophy hunting in 2016, except in the cases of certain problem animals that damage crops or animals.
Environmental groups who have monitored Arthur for the past nine years insist it lived deep in the wild and had no contact with humans.
Agent Green, a NGO, said the hunting permit was issued for a cub-rearing female bear that had caused damage in the village of Ojdula in Transylvania last summer.
"It was always about shooting the biggest bear and not about solving the problem of the community," Gabriel Paun, president of Agent Green, told the Associated Press.
"I wonder how the prince mistook the biggest male living deep in the wild against the much smaller female next to the village."
"Every farmer I spoke to in the village of Ojdula said that nothing had changed since the male bear was shot and that the female bear continues to come daily to the households. This is poaching as the prince shot the wrong bear,"Mr Paun said.
A senior official from Romania's environmental ministry, Octavian Berceanu, said that poaching was suspected.
"All of the papers from the National Environmental Guard will go to the police," he said, referring to a branch of the ministry.
Mr Berceanu also said that some official papers that are required after a bear kill are missing.
"The local environment agency should inform the Environmental Guard after the shooting, but this didn't happen," Mr Berceanu said.
