After Bruno's tragic death  it appears his mother could be next for the sniper's bullet. Jurka, 8, a wild brown bear from Trentino, Italy, is threatened with the same fate which befell her son Bruno, who was shot in Bavaria at the end of June after weeks spent rampaging through farms and killing sheep. The animal rights group "Pro Wildlife" has reported that Bruno's mom is in mortal danger after going on a killing spree of her own.

"An the end of a debate which took place on Thursday in the Bavarian state parliament, the big game expert attached to the environment ministry let slip quite casually that the killing of Bruno's mother Jurka is also under discussion," said Pro-Wildlife spokeswoman Sandra Altherr. She added that the environment ministry worker mentioned a conference for bear experts, at which Jurka's fate was discussed: Apparently Austrian representatives of the WWF (formerly the "World Wildlife Fund") had brought up the subject of possibly shooting Bruno's mother.

Jurka was born in Slovenia in 1998 and was moved to Italy in 2001, when the country was seeking to increase its bear population. She became famous in Italy almost straight away because she wasn't shy of people and repeatedly foraged in residential areas. She also picked up some bad habits. When she mauled a sheep and then returned to the same location, she was shot with rubber bullets and scared away with firecrackers: She learned to move on from kill to kill and never return to the scene of a previous crime.

Jurka is thought to have passed on this tactic to her son, Bruno, who just like his mother showed little fear of mankind -- which according to experts makes bears potentially dangerous. Bruno was first seen in Germany at the end of May. Soon he was making headlines for all the wrong reasons -- killing sheep, attacking chickens and rabbits, helping himself to honey from a beehive, and leaving a trail of bloody devastation through southern Germany. In total he covered a distance of over 300 km. For weeks he was pursued by experts, including a team of Finnish hunters,   who failed to take him alive.

Werner Schnappauf, Bavaria's Minister for the Environment, finally sanctioned using lethal force on the bear. Conservation groups criticized him for this decision, but Schnappauf insisted that bear experts, including WWF, had advised him from the start to shoot Bruno.

"Protecting people comes before the protection of animals," he said.

Still, his office denied that the shooting of Bruno's mother had also been discussed. "At the relevant meeting Jurka, the bear was indeed a topic for conservation," said Roland Eichhorn, the ministry's spokesman. But he insisted the debate was merely about whether she should be caged for good, or whether she could be tagged and re-released -- but trained with rubber bullets to avoid humans. Austrian experts from WWF were in favor of permanent capture, reportedly, while the second strategy appealed to the Italians.