![]() “He had gotten desperate and now we know why.” “That was kind of the first step in a radical rapid change in behavior,” says Pratt. Suddenly, he was sleeping in backyards and looking for small animals like raccoons or pets to eat. For 10 years, he had used all of Griffith Park as his habitat, only paying brief visits to urban areas. Then in November, P-22 killed a chihuahua and attacked several other dogs, in close proximity to humans. But he was still hunting deer and behaving normally otherwise, so there was no reason to bring him in for assessment.Ī pair of photos provided by the National Park Service shows the southern California mountain lion known as P-22, left, in March 2014 when he was suffering from mange, and at right in December 2015, without lesions or scabs. In May there was an inkling of trouble, Pratt said, when public photos of him showed that his tail looked thin – potentially with mange. It was only this year that things began to slip. When he did pop up over the years – for example, when he ate an elderly koala at the Los Angeles Zoo or when he wandered past houses in the residential neighborhoods such as Los Feliz and Silverlake – he was celebrated. The big cat lived a mostly quiet life – eating deer, roaming around at night, in the presence of millions of humans but rarely seen. She tattooed his face on her arm, and dubbed him “the Brad Pitt of mountain lions” – handsome, enigmatic and unlucky in love (he never found a mate because he was cut off from his kind in the park). Pratt points out that in any other part of the country, P-22 probably would have been removed or killed. He was soon fitted with a collar to track his movements, and the city started to fall in love. P-22 rocketed to fame after being caught on film in Griffith Park a decade ago. He eventually found the wilderness of Griffith Park to set up his range – at 8 sq miles, it was probably the smallest roaming territory of any known mountain lion (typically a male cat’s territory is 150 sq miles).Ī trail camera picture of P-22 in Los Angeles, 2012. Sometime around 2012, P-22 left the Santa Monica mountains and set off on a remarkable 50-mile journey that took him across two major Los Angeles freeways, evading traffic and human detection. P stands for puma, while the number corresponds to the individual cat being tracked by National Park Service biologists. ![]() P-22 was born around 2010, and his name derived from a study of mountain lions in the area. P-22’s journey to Griffith Park began many miles away in the Santa Monica mountains outside the city of Los Angeles. Even in the city that gave us Carmeggedon, where we thought wildness had been banished a long time ago, P-22 reminded us it’s still here.” A remarkable journey from wilderness to city We are part of nature and he reminded us of that. ![]() “He made us more human, made us connect more to that wild place in ourselves. “He changed us,” wrote Beth Pratt, regional California director for the National Wildlife Foundation who spent the last decade working and advocating for P-22, in a remembrance. It’s unusual for a city to root for an apex predator in its midst, but his life reflected the best of Los Angeles: inclusivity, joy and living in harmony with the natural world. Simply knowing that a big cat was out there – stalking the night under the Hollywood sign – comforted people who had grown to love him. Biologist Francis Appiah, Caltrans mitigation specialist, wears a face mask with the image of P-22. ![]()
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