- A 70-year-old man was out hunting for wild boar when a brown bear with cubs attacked him.
- He shot the bear twice, killing it after it clamped its jaws on his legs and dragged him 50 feet.
- The incident has sparked debate surrounding the safety of boosting bear numbers in France's Pyrennees.
A 70-year-old man was savaged by a brown bear while hunting for wild boar in the Pyrenees region of southwest France.
The man was attacked when he crossed paths with the bear and her cubs. It grabbed him by the legs and dragged him for 50 feet, but he was able to shoot her twice with his hunting rifle, killing her instantly, say reports.
The man was flown by helicopter to the hospital. The man's legs were "shredded" by the bear, French news site La Depeche reported. He is still in a serious condition, AFP reported.
According to Jean-Luc Fernandez, the president of the Ariège hunting federation, he "owes his life" to a volunteer firefighter. She rushed to the scene and treated the hunter's severe wounds after he made an SOS call on his walkie-talkie, Fernandez told La Depeche.
The bear was later found dead close where the man was rescued.
The president of the departmental council in Ariège, Christine Tequi, said that such attacks were "what we feared" when brown bears were reintroduced to the Pyrenees after the bear population plummeted in the 1990s the BBC reported.
The incident has reignited the fierce debate between hunters and environmental advocates of the bears.
"It is a hunter who was attacked, but it could be a hiker or a mushroom picker," said Tequi, as reported by France3.
A 2020 census counted 64 bears in the Pyrenees across the mountain chain on the France-Spain border. There were less than a dozen in 1995, according to RFI.
Between January 1 and October 31 of this year, bears are calculated to have killed 625 sheep, 16 cattle, 17 horses, and one dog in the region, according to La Depeche.