Authorities in the Spanish region of Castile and Leon were trying on Tuesday to find a brown bear and her cub, separated by the brutal attack of a male on the cub that the mother managed to save, a fight filmed by a amateur videographer.
“We know that the bear is injured, but we don’t know anything else,” a source from the environment department in this region of northern Spain told AFP.
The male and female fought over a cliff, and both ended up falling from great heights, hitting rocks, with one rolling for a long time before coming to rest, according to the video of two hikers.
Despite its larger size, the bear died in the fight, authorities said, and the injured female returned to pick up the cub for a possible reunion, which authorities are trying to confirm.
The incident happened in Peña de Santa Lucía, in the province of Palencia.
As the organization Nature Castilla y León explained on Twitter, at this time of year “mothers often have to defend their young against attacks by males who seek to bring them back into heat”.
“Like other animals, bears have a reproductive instinct. He is looking for bears with their cubs to kill the cubs,” the president of the Brown Bear Foundation, Guillermo Palomero, told AFP. “The bear goes into heat two or three days later, and this infanticidal bear can mate with her and leave her genes,” he added, calling the attacks “very violent.”
The female, “located several weeks ago with two cubs, had recently lost one, probably due to an attack by this male or another,” said Nature Castille and León.
According to a statement from the regional government, “technical personnel, veterinarians, environmental agents, environmental protectors and the Bear Patrols of the Natural Heritage Foundation” of the region, assisted by the Civil Guard, participate in the research.
In Spain, some 330 brown bears live in the Cantabrian mountain range and another 70 in the Pyrenees, according to the Brown Bear Foundation.
