Animal succumbs to effects of anaesthetic after her attack on a man reignited debate over woodland repopulation programme

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

A female brown bear with cubs who mauled a man out looking for mushrooms near his home in northern Italy has died after being given an anaesthetic by officials attempting to capture her.

The fate of Daniza, an 18-year-old bear transferred from Slovenia into the woodlands around Trentino in 2000, has sparked passionate debate in recent weeks over the future of the EU-backed project that reintroduced her into the Italian wild.

Following the mid-August attack on Daniele Maturi, a 38-year-old cable car worker, the province of Trento ordered Daniza's capture, attempting for weeks to entice her into tubular traps laced with meat and fish.

The aim was to take her into captivity and let her two cubs, now thought to be around nine months old, roam free by themselves. Only if the capture went badly wrong and Daniza posed "immediate danger", the order said, should she be killed.

Eventually, however, the attempted capture did result in her death, although it is believed the anaesthetic, as opposed to any deliberate action, was to blame.

In a statement issued on Thursday morning, the province of Trento said that "after almost a month of intensive monitoring" conditions were ripe on Wednesday night for "a secure intervention" with a dart gun to anaesthetise the bear.

"The capture team's intervention allowed the bear to go to sleep, but she did not survive," said the statement, adding that an autopsy would be carried out later on Thursday.

The news of Daniza's death prompted anger among environmentalists and animal rights groups in Italy, who had rallied tens of thousands of people in online campaigns and petitions against her capture.

They argued that Maturi had simply come very close to a mother bear who was defending her cubs, and that it was not fair to punish a wild animal for behaving naturally.

On Thursday, the forestry police were reported to have opened an investigation into suspected animal abuse and the unnecessary killing of an animal.

"What has happened to Daniza the bear is not an accident or a chance occurrence but an animal murder," said Carla Rocchi, president of ENPA, the national body for the protection of animals, in a statement.

A statement from WWF Italia said the death was the "sad confirmation" of the organisation's belief that the capture was wrong-headed.

While insisting it remained committed to the Life Ursus reintroduction project, the province of Trento had said its course of action on Daniza was necessary to protect public safety.

Following the mauling – the first attack by one of the bears on a human – many residents in Pinzolo, the small Alpine town where Maturi lives, said they were increasingly worried about the thriving bear population, now believed to total 50.

Farmers have long complained that the bears are bad news for livestock. In the weeks after her mauling of Maturi, Daniza was reported by Italian daily La Repubblica to have killed several local sheep and a goat.

But that has not mollified opposition to her capture. Angelo Bonelli, a spokesman for the political party Federation of the Greens, said on Thursday that the death called into question "the civility of our society" and called on prosecutors to open a criminal investigation.

"A bear that sought to defend her own cubs from danger has died at the hands of the institutions, and now her small cubs are also in danger without the protection of their mother," he said.