The cautions come following several incidents, including one filmed earlier this month which went viral and which showed three bear cubs strolling around the yard of a Harju County farmhouse in full view of people.

"The truth is that even a one-and-a-half-year-old bear has claws, fangs and considerable strength, enough to inflict very serious injuries on a person if necessary. An attack by a mother bear would most likely be fatal," said Ruttar Roht, a representative of the Ardu Hunting Society – a society member had put up the original bear cubs video, adding wild animals are always unpredictable.

"The truth is that even a one-and-a-half-year-old bear has claws and fangs and quite a lot of strength, which, if necessary, can cause quite serious injuries to a person. An attack by a female bear would most likely end fatally for a person," Roht went on.

Marko Vinn, advisor to the national hunting society, said while encounters with bears in Estonia have so far ended happily for all involved, with large predators increasingly venturing into human settlements, sooner or later that happy situation may change.

How the three cubs came to be separated from their mother is unknown, with speculation including she had come to harm, had temporarily abandoned her cubs for their safety, or they had escaped from her – Vinn said this could happen if an adult male had attempted to kill the cubs in order to mate with the mother with a view to producing his own cubs, a not unheard-of scenario with bears in the wild.

While the cubs in the video are too young to viably survive without their mother over the long term, this does not mean feeding them and giving them water is an option – the animals might then become reliant on human aid, which is also unnecessary given the abundance of freshwater bodies, small and large, in Estonia.

Estonians, Vinn noted, have lost their rural roots and have become so urbanized that they have lost a clear picture of nature red in tooth and claw, tending to see the animals more as cute cuddly toys.

Roht and Vinn disagreed on the rise in bear numbers being down to clear-cutting of forests – clearing away trees wholesale – with Roht saying if anything the practice provides more opportunities for them to hunt, and so does not drive them out of the forest as has been claimed; it is simply the numbers, around 1,100 and counting, which have led to more bears, often weaker individuals, ending up nearer to human habitation than before, he said.

As omnivores, bears will happily feed on berries and fruit found in bogland and open areas, and even on agricultural produce.

The viral video shared by the Estonian Hunters' Society on July 23 showed cubs later confirmed to have returned to the forest, though one is thought to have later raided a chicken coop in Paide, prompting the Rescue Board and the Environmental Agency to relocate it.

Over the past 20 years, the bear population has almost doubled, indicating a very favorable conservation status, Maaleht reported, adding the low point in the thousands of years they have been resident in the area – since the end of the last ice age, in fact – came in the 1920s, when only around 30 animals were living in the country, and even in the 1950s the figure was below 100.

Hunters' lobby groups have been calling for an expansion to the annual bear cull, claiming numbers are now too high.

Worldwide, brown bears (Ursus arctos) number around 200,000, with an estimated 130,000 of these being in the Russian Federation. Grizzly bears are a subspecies of the brown bear.

If you see bear cubs apparently separated from their mother, you should call the national information hotline on 1247.

The Estonian Hunters' Society advises staying calm, never feeding bears, making noise while walking in forests, and avoiding bear cubs, carcasses and roaming alone. If a bear is seen near homes as in the recent events, scare it away with loud noise rather than approaching or photographing it. Keep dogs leashed, back away slowly if threatened, never run or climb a tree, and if attacked by a brown bear, lie on the ground, protect your head and neck, and play dead.

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