A brown bear has succumbed after being beaten to death by residents of a small village in Ardabil province in northwestern Iran, the official Irna news agency reported.
Residents of Namin “captured the animal” using “inappropriate methods and behavior,” said a ranger report, quoted by Irna on Sunday.
“They chased him and beat him… before running him over with a tractor, breaking his leg, his pelvis and damaging his spine,” the report added.
A photo posted by Irna shows the bear tied the rope around its neck to a backhoe, with its rear legs stuck under a tractor.
Environmental protection officers who arrived on the scene a little later “transported it to a wildlife clinic in the provincial capital, but the large mammal succumbed to its injuries”, adds Irna.
Also on Sunday, a leopard was shot and killed in a town in northern Iran after attacking and wounding a policeman, spreading panic among residents.
The daily “Teheran Times” claimed in 2019 that the decline in the population of brown bears in Iran was due to humans, in particular poaching.
“Local people sometimes kill bears due to a traditional misconception that bear meat has many medicinal properties,” the newspaper noted.
Also, due to food scarcity, bears are attracted to ranching areas and some rural dwellers use guns and poison bait to kill them, in order to defend their crops and livestock.