Sweden’s annual brown bear hunt kicked off on Wednesday, with over 150 bears killed in the opening days. The country’s government has approved the killing of 486 brown bears – 20 percent of the wild population – between August 21 and October 15. 

By Thursday afternoon, less than two days in, 152 had already been shot, Sweden’s Environmental Protection Agency announced. The cull goes against the bear’s status as a “strictly protected species” within the European Union, and conservationists are understandably outraged.

Truls Gulowsen, head of the Norwegian Nature Conservation Organisation, told The Guardian they were “very concerned with this culling”.

“It’s a significant and quite dramatic reduction of the Scandinavian brown bear population. Now that Sweden is seriously decreasing its stock, it will impact the survivability of the entire Scandinavian population.”

Brown bears were hunted to the brink of extinction in Sweden at the beginning of the last century, but their numbers have since recovered. They reached a peak of almost 3,300 in 2008, and as of last year, there were an estimated 2,450.

“100 years of brown bear conservation progress in Sweden is right now being undone at an alarming speed,” write Sweden’s “Big Five” carnivore protection project in a statement.

The project claims the government is “on a clear path” to cull the bear population to 1,400 – the minimum number of bears needed to maintain a viable population.

Last year, 648 bears were shot during “licensed quota hunting” and a further 74 were killed during so-called “protective hunting” – a total of 722 dead bears.

“We can absolutely not continue to shoot this many bears if we are to have a stable bear population around the 2,400 bears we have today,” Jonas Kindberg, leader of the Scandinavian Bear Project run by the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, added.

As well as being detrimental to the brown bear population, the cull will have ramifications for the rest of the ecosystem. Losing a top predator, also known to aid seed dispersal, could negatively impact a number of different species.

It’s not just bears that have faced population control measures in Sweden. In 2023, the Scandinavian country approved the largest wolf cull in modern history, before announcing the killing of hundreds of lynxes just weeks later.

This year, for the first time, police will accompany hunters in anticipation of protests as controversy surrounding the cull continues to mount.