Despite abundant cheese and chocolate, Switzerland is apparently not appealing to wild bears. This becomes a lot less mysterious when you find out that officials just shot the only wild bear in the country, a brown bear called M13.
M13 probably wandered into Switzerland from Italy, ignoring the bear-hobo chalk signs saying, “Stay away, here they shoot bears.” He wasn’t scared of much — certainly not humans. He would wander through Swiss villages in broad daylight, like a tourist looking for some fondue, and had a habit of breaking into the beehives behind a local school. It was a good enough life, but it freaked the hell out of the humans he hung around. And so they shot him.
“Both in the autumn and now after waking from his winter sleep, the bear kept looking for food in villages, had followed people in broad daylight and — despite repeated measures to scare him off — showed absolutely no fear of humans,” said the office in a Wednesday statement. “He was classified as a risk to human safety… it became inevitable that he would be shot.”
Brown bears like M13 aren’t considered a threatened species in Europe. Just threatening enough that humans can’t tolerate them.
