Featured Image Credit: (Facebook/Omar Farang Zin)
Topics: Animals, World News
Brenna Cooper
A tourist who posed for a selfie with a bear cub in Romania was mauled to death just a day later.
Italian national Omar Farang Zin had been riding his motorbike along the Transfagarasan road in the Carpathian Mountains when he was attacked by a brown bear and dragged into a ravine.
According to local law enforcement, tourists had alerted emergency services to the attack, with the 49-year-old found deceased an hour later in a steep ravine.
Just a day before the fatal attack Zin had taken photos and videos of bears while travelling along the picturesque region in central Arges region, and posting them on social media.
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"Here's the bear," he can be heard saying in the video, adding: "How beautiful. It's coming towards me."
Zin had also shared a photo of himself smiling and pointing to one of the bears on the side of the road.
According to various reports, Zin had returned to the area the following day where he is allegedly encountered a female bear and her cubs at the side of the road.
Romanian authorities have since confirmed the bear has been put down.
Bears are native to around 22 countries across Europe.
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Romania has the largest population of the animal outside of European Russia, with reports suggesting there could be as many as 13,000 bears roaming through mountainous regions.
Your odds of being attacked by a bear remain relatively low, with statistics from the World Animal Foundation stating that 40 humans get attacked by the predatory animals every year.
According to Romania's environment ministry, nearly 30 people have been fatally attacked by bears within the last two decades, with 19 of those deaths taking place in the last five years.
Prior to Zin's death, an unnamed teenage girl had been dragged from a hiking path and thrown down a ravine in the Bucegi mountains in-front of her horrified boyfriend. Meanwhile a 72-year-old British tourist was also attacked by a bear after winding her window down to take a photo in Arges County last year.
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The rise in bear attacks has prompted conversations about how to deal with interactions between humans and bears in the country.
Last year Romanian authorities authorised the cull of 481 bears after noting an increase in distress calls.
Tourists are also advised to follow local warnings in order to minimise their risk of being attacked.
"The problem is not too many bears but the fact that we have more and more bears that are accustomed to the presence of humans and associate humans with food availability," WWF Romania's Cristian Papp explained to The Telegraph.