MINSK, November 13. /TASS/. The chairman of the Belarusian Hunters and Fishermen Society, Igor Shunevich, proposed culling the population of brown bears in the country by hunting them outside the hunting season.

However, this applies only to bears that enter populated areas and injure people, he explained at a meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

"This does not mean that it will be open season [on the brown bear]. It is on the endangered species list," BelTA agency quotes him as saying. "But if the population gets too large, we must cull a certain number [of bears], especially animals causing problems, those that get into neighborhoods, apiaries and terrorize people," Shunevich said.

Shunevich noted that during the meeting with the president, a number of proposals were put forward to regulate the bear and lynx population that do not involve "extreme moves, clearly unpopular, but solutions that life itself necessitates." He specified that it is necessary to reduce the population of brown bears only where they "interfere with human activity, and only to create a balance between human and animal interests."

According to the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, the bear population grew to 700 as of the end of 2022 against 589 a year earlier.

"As of today, there is no major problem between large predators and humans in Belarus," the deputy director to the Academy of Sciences’ Scientific and Practical Center for Biological Resources, Pavel Geshtovt, pointed out.

In late August, Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Andrey Khudyk said that everything was okay in Belarus in terms of ecology, which even saw an increase in biodiversity of plants. Khudyk expressed confidence that some kinds of plants and animals would be taken off the Belarusian Red List of Threatened Species, "since we are already seeing an increase in populations which in principle no longer need to be protected by law."