The hunter waited until dark. Concealed in an observatory with small windows, used to monitor animal behaviour, he checked his watch - 9.40pm. It was cold and the snow was thick, following several days of heavy falls. The bear appeared. It was a big male, at least 12 years old. The hunter felt at once thrilled and fearful. He took aim through a window, then pulled the trigger. The bear stood no chance. It died instantly, the bullet entered just behind its left arm - blood dripped from the wound.

"I asked for a big, old male. They gave it to me. I am very pleased. I will come back in the autumn, to hunt black goats," said 66-year-old Fernando Pancorbo from Spain, who has been hunting for over50 years.

Hunters from around the world are drawn to Romania because of the abundance of wild brown bears - and they`re prepared to pay up to 20,000 euros to bag one. Three hundred were killed for sport in 2010.

All of which is perfectly legal, despite the fact that the European Union deems these animals to be endangered, placing them on its red list of protected species. So how is this possible?

The problem stems from an exemption in EU law which permits the killing of bears if they are found to have threatened people or damaged public or private property. This is seized upon by some unscrupulous managers of hunting areas, who exaggerate or simply make up reports of the destruction caused and then rake in fat profits from the fees they charge foreign hunters to kill the supposedly errant animals.

The hunting exemption can only be applied if it can be proved that the killing of such bears does not affect the overall population. The hunting lobby maintains that the latter is the case, but there`s no

reliable way of counting animal numbers in place, nor is there a coordinated approach to monitoring their movement, at a time whe