This incredibly cruel footage showing how brown bears are hunted and tortured by hunters in Turkey is currently causing outrage.
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Unbearable footage
In early July, the Haytap organisation published two videos on Facebook. The first showed an injured and bloody brown bear being hunted by dogs. According to the animal welfare organisation, the videos were taken around two months earlier near Arhavi, in the Artvin province in the northeast of Turkey.
In the background of the video, you can hear the hunters yelling and joking as the dogs jump all over the weakened, groaning bears and not one of the hunters ever considered helping the poor animal.
The second video, posted by the organisation two days later, shows two hunters beating a dead bear corpse.
Violent criticism of Turkish hunting regulations
The Haytap organisation then began protesting and denounced laws about the hunting regulations in Turkey which many people do not consider to be strict enough. Around 3,000 brown bears live in Turkey, most of which reside in the north of the country.
According to the Bern Convention, brown bears are considered a protected species and the animal has already completely disappeared in some European countries. Although Turkey also signed the Bern Convention, they consider brown bears to be an exception and reserve the right to control the population of this species within Turkish borders.
