A Bulgarian tourist has suffered serious bite wounds after a mother bear smashed through his car window and tried to drag him out of his vehicle on a mountain road in Romania — an attack he admits was his own fault after he stopped to feed the animal.
Georgi Bizhev, 46, a sports official and former football club president, was driving along a mountain road near the Vidraru Dam in the Carpathian mountains last Wednesday when he spotted a mother bear and her cub and pulled over. He threw food scraps at the animals and began filming them on his phone — a decision that quickly turned dangerous when the mother bear launched a sudden and ferocious attack on his vehicle.
Footage captured by a passing motorist shows the bear lunging directly into Bizhev’s car window, while video recorded by Bizhev himself shows him screaming for help as the animal claws at him through the opening. The bear smashed the window, biting and clawing at Bizhev’s left arm as he raised it to shield his face and neck. He said the animal was attempting to pull him out of the car entirely. “I saw the bear’s ears prick up and it jumped at me,” he said. “It tried to grab me and pull me out of the car.” He credited his seatbelt with preventing worse injury, and said other drivers eventually honked their horns and shouted to scare the bear away. He alerted guards at the dam and Romanian emergency services responded to the scene.
Bizhev was candid about his own culpability. “I entered its environment. It was a mistake for which I paid,” he said. Romanian officials confirmed the mother bear was almost certainly acting to protect her cub and urged tourists not to approach or feed wild bears, which are protected in Romania but increasingly habituated to human contact in the Carpathian region.
The stretch of road where the incident occurred is a well-known bear corridor, popular with tourists who regularly stop to observe and photograph wildlife. Bizhev acknowledged that food is even sold at stops along the route for exactly this purpose, though he accepted that feeding bears is inappropriate behaviour. He has since returned to Bulgaria for further treatment.
The incident comes in the same week that a bear injured four people in a Japanese residential area. Police and fire department officials were called to the Sasakino district of Fukushima in northeastern Japan on Tuesday after a black bear appeared at the Fukushima Steel Works, chasing and throwing to the ground a male employee in his twenties before injuring a second male employee in his sixties within the same compound. The bear subsequently attacked a male employee in his sixties at a separate nearby company, and also injured a woman in her eighties who lives in the neighbourhood, the Fukushima City Fire Department confirmed. Security camera footage of the Japanese attack captured the moment the bear emerged and pursued the first victim.
