Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a bill that would allow hunters to shoot bears in populated areas at their own discretion after human encounters with the wild animals hit record levels.
Across the nation, 219 people were attacked by bears in the 12 months to April last year, with six human fatalities — the highest since statistics began nearly two decades ago.
Climate change affecting bear food sources and hibernation times, along with depopulation caused by an aging society, are causing the animals to venture into towns more frequently.
Photo: Reuters
The revised wildlife protection and management law would allow “emergency shootings” following complaints that hunters have been hampered by red tape.
The Japanese Ministry of the Environment hopes to present the bill to parliament in the coming months and get it enacted before autumn, when bear sightings typically surge, said a ministry official, who declined to be named.
Currently, shooting animals such as bears or wild boar in residential areas is forbidden.
Even when bears hole themselves up in populated areas, hunters are not allowed to shoot without being given the green light by police.
Even then, police “can only issue such a command in an extremely dire situation, such as when a person is seconds away from being attacked,” the ministry official said.
Under current rules, “you would have to wait until someone is actually in danger to get police approval,” he said.
A bear in December last year rampaged through a supermarket in northern Japan for two days before being lured out with food coated in honey.
It wounded a 47-year-old man before shoppers were evacuated and the bear laid waste to the meat department.
More than 9,000 bears were killed in Japan in the 12 months to April last year.
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
RSS