Commentary: The sad plight of P-22, Los Angeles’ mountain lion

It was heartbreaking to see P-22, the majestic and resourceful mountain lion who lives in Griffith Park, lying tranquilized in a heap on a green tarp in a Los Feliz backyard on Monday, surrounded by authorities. The last time he was cornered by people in Los Feliz seven years ago he was hiding out in the crawlspace of a house under construction. When no one was looking, he dashed back to Griffith Park without incident and returned to his normal life. Not this time.

P-22’s clever way of living in the second largest metropolis in the country has been upended. He was taken from the backyard to Los Angeles Zoo, where veterinarians evaluated his health and found him to be in stable condition — or stable enough for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to transport him elsewhere. Officials from the department had said earlier he seemed to be “in distress.”

But who knows what that means? All we know is that his forays into the surrounding neighborhoods became more frequent and unsettling. In the Hollywood Hills, he stalked a dog walker with a Chihuahua and killed the dog. He injured another dog. He ventured south of Los Feliz Boulevard. He had a stare-down with a pit bull but didn’t attack. He showed up on plenty of neighborhood video cameras, sometimes just a lone figure slinking down a brightly lit residential street past cars. In the last few days there was a report that he had been hit by a car.

It’s not that he ran out of prey in Griffith Park. Just weeks ago he killed a big deer buck and feasted on it. “It was good to see him still killing and eating deer,” Jeff Sikich, one of the researchers who study the lions in the 20-year National Park Service study, said last month. The lions in the area that have been collared with GPS devices are tracked as they go about their lives.

In the decade since P-22 was collared as a young lion for the study, he has become emblematic of all that is wild and wonderful in Los Angeles. He was immortalized in a photo taken by a remote camera that caught him standing on a hillside with the Hollywood sign behind him. He is possibly the oldest lion — 12 going on 13 — in the study still alive. He has survived mange and a cramped range in Griffith Park, always assiduously avoiding the people there — and everywhere he went. The lions who live in the hillsides around us are masters at avoiding us, even when they are caught on doorbell video slinking through backyards in the dead of night.

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But something changed recently for P-22. From photos and video, Seth Riley, a National Park Service researcher who has studied P-22 for a decade, could see he wasn’t the same cat that he was in 2013 when he was snapped in front of the Hollywood sign. He looked older and appeared to have hair loss on his face.

Did his leonine desire to roam lead him to cross the delicate boundary between his territory and ours? Years ago, he came close to crossing the line when he (probably) killed a koala at the L.A. Zoo one night. Officials at the zoo said they would do a better job of securing the koala enclosure at night.

His options now are unclear. Putting him in a zoo after a life in the wild would be cruel. Relocating him to another wild area would be dangerous since he might end up competing against a younger lion who had already staked the area as his own. He could go to a sanctuary, but when the 9 square miles of Griffith Park are considered tiny for a mountain lion, it may be a challenge to find a sanctuary that offers at least that. Euthanasia seems unthinkable.

If only he could scamper back to Griffith Park like he did seven years ago, that would be ideal. But he may have finally outgrown it. Wherever he goes next will be a test of whether we care enough about the extraordinary lions in our midst to find this one a place worthy of his last years.