• Animals They find alive the bear that faced the male that fell in Palencia

The recent attack by a brown bear on a female with a calf in the Palentina Mountain, which has gone "viral" on social networks and the media after being recorded by two nature observers, was due to the fact that

the male intended to finish with the cub so that the female would enter the heat phase again

, something that is not exceptional among wild animals.

In an interview, the president of the Brown Bear Foundation, Guillermo Palomero, has detailed that

"bear infanticide is not something that happens every day

, but it is not exceptional, some case occurs every year."

Although not all of them become as viral as the one that occurred this Sunday in the Palentina Mountain, where the attack of a male and a female bear with a bear cub ended with the two adults falling down a cliff in the Palentina Mountain and the bear, an animal of 217 kilos, dead.

Since then, the female and her calf have been

found alive

, -the female with significant injuries according to the blood traces-, in a cave that is difficult to access, -with a gallery length of more than 15 meters , narrowing less than 80 centimeters and numerous vertical wells with a diameter of less than 50 centimeters, close to the place of the attack and presumably in the company of the bear cub.

Guillermo Palomero assures that this attack falls within a

reproductive profile behavior of males

that do not access receptive females, because they are with small pups, and decide to kill the pups so that the female goes into heat.

"The goal was not to kill the bear, but to leave her genes. The goal was to kill the calf to force the female to go into heat," he summarizes.

"It's an infanticidal attack, an attempt to kill the calf," she adds.

In addition, the experts handle the hypothesis that

the male could have killed the other cub that the bear had

, since the follow-ups carried out on the female had confirmed that she had two cubs.

"Three days before we had seen her with two pups and on Sunday we only saw her with one, so it is likely that before attacking the female she killed the other pup," says Palomero.

"But it's just a hypothesis," he insists.

The fact is that the images of the attack -"which is very aggressive and the female defends herself very well", according to Palomero-, have gone viral, in the opinion of the expert, for a double interest: the one that these scenes arouse " so little seen" and the one that bears arouse, in particular, among human beings.

And it is that, if in general "predators attract us a lot", bears are even more attractive and interesting for us because of the connotations they have.

He is a friendly plantigrade and every child has had a teddy bear.

"That's why these exceptional images go viral," he says.

"But you have to explain them," adds Palomero, because

bears are not stuffed animals, they are wild animals that do this kind of thing.

Palomero considers that "it is good that people see that nature is like that and has moments that can break very human schemes".

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