Mourning P-22, the Mountain Lion of Los Angeles
P-22, in 2015. Creative Commons licensed image from the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
In early December 2022, the Santa Monica National Park Service posted on Instagram about P-22, a Los Angeles celebrity mountain lion. P-22 had started leaving his territory in Griffith Park and roaming around people’s homes. A few weeks earlier, he’d killed a dog on a leash in the Hollywood Hills. His behavior had changed, something was wrong, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) had decided to trap him so they could check his health.
When I read the post, my heart sank. Like many others in the city, I’d been following news about P-22 for years as he roamed the park, but I had a terrible feeling that his story was coming to an end.
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Mountain lions—also known as cougars or pumas—are apex predators in the chaparral-covered mountains of Southern California, so you won’t find very many of them. According to the National Park Service, there are 10-15 mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains outside L.A. at any given time. They’re so rare that most people can forget they exist entirely—remembering, with a jolt, that there are real live lions on the borders of our metropolis.
P-22, the 22nd puma in an ongoing study of L.A.’s puma population, was born sometime around 2010. Male mountain lions roam extraordinarily large territories as they hunt mule deer and other prey, about 150 square miles over the course of their lives. At some point in his youth, P-22 crossed two freeways to leave the Santa Monica Mountains and enter Griffith Park, home of the famous Hollywood sign.
But he never should have ended up there. At just five square miles, Griffith Park is the smallest territory ever recorded for a male mountain lion. P-22 found himself walled in on all sides by freeways and development, and ended up spending the next 10 years in the park, unable to mate or find his way back to his original home. Mountain lions apparently do quite poorly when they’re forcibly relocated, so the researchers who had fitted him with a radio collar could only observe as he lived out a strange, constrained life above the city.
It’s hard to say exactly when P-22 became famous. In 2013, a photographer for National Geographic took a now-iconic photo of him prowling underneath the Hollywood sign. In 2014, he was exposed to rat poisoning, and researchers successfully treated him for the resulting mange. In 2016, he caught and killed a koala from the L.A. Zoo, but the public was quick to forgive him.
However it happened, the lion of Griffith Park gradually became a celebrity. He was the subject of five books and three films. There’s an exhibit dedicated to him in the National History Museum of Los Angeles. He looked much like any other mountain lion, but mountain lions in general are pretty stunning, with bottomless eyes and powerful golden bodies. Like his cousins to the west, P-22 was a stunning, awe-inspiring creature. And like everyone else struggling in this crowded, bristling city, he tried to make the best of a bad situation.
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A few days after they announced they were going to catch him, CDFW tranquilized P-22 and took him to San Diego for his health workup. They confirmed the news that he’d recently been hit by a car. I imagined him unconscious, loaded onto a truck, driven for three hours down the 5 freeway. It was a sickening thought.
Online, the inevitable discourse started to bubble up. “No more evaluations! Return P-22 to his native habitat!” one Instagram user cried. “This is total bullshit,” said another. “They are going to say it is for his own good because he is old but it is 100% a cover for a dead dog.” Suddenly, everyone with a smartphone was a veterinarian, and everyone with an opinion was an expert. Did they expect CDFW to dump him back in the park, injured and unwell? How could someone think that was best?
The problem was that they were frightened for him and angry on his behalf, and they needed a villain to blame. Not the abstract villainy of colonization and development, which would force them to really grapple with their own complicity. They wanted a villain with a face, someone to be a heel for P-22’s heroism. Honestly, I get it. It’s easier when a villain is easy, when they twirl a nice big mustache for all to see.
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A few years ago, I came across a painting by Walton Ford called “Grifo de California.” The painting shows a griffon sitting on a grassy cliffside, with chaparral yucca blooming in the background. Instead of an eagle, the griffon’s front half is a California condor—a huge, breathtaking kind of vulture with a 10-foot wingspan. The back half is that of a mountain lion.
Ford has described the painting as satire, but I see it almost as a set of instructions, coded in the language of myth. To me, “Grifo de California” points to a new kind of story, similar to what the Indigenous writer Robin Wall Kimmerer calls becoming “indigenous to place:”
“For the sake of the people and the land, the urgent work of the [settler] may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?
“What happens when we truly become native to a place, when we finally make a home? Where are the stories that lead the way?” (Braiding Sweetgrass, pg. 207)
The moment settlers set foot on this land, we began to raze and flatten it, killing the inhabitants, erasing the land’s history and myth. Imported ornamental plants replaced the oaks and sycamores, while industry destroyed the fertile, generous soil. I write these words while Christmas music blasts in every shop and restaurant, inundating us with songs about sleighs and reindeer and holly and other symbols that are utterly divorced from our reality. Where are our songs about the dry and rainy seasons, the fragrant sages, the staticky autumn winds? Southern California has become a place of simulacra, with luxury buildings named after cities in Italy and theme parks inviting us into empty fantasies.
But the mythology of “Grifo de California” offers a new kind of relationship to the land we live on. What if settlers could let our traditions and worldviews grow roots in the land we actually live on? What if our griffons were formed from condors and pumas? Our dragons from alligator lizards, our unicorns from bighorn sheep? What if, as Kimmerer writes, we finally learned to see this land as a family, a home, a partner, instead of a blank canvas?
People’s love of P-22 gave me hope that maybe, amidst all the wanton destruction and erasure, that kind of connection was possible. That maybe we could finally open our eyes and see this land on its own terms, and figure out how to belong to it.
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A few people complained about the name P-22. So impersonal. So clinical. This was a living creature, not just the subject of a study. But if the loudest voices in L.A. had been allowed to give him a cute nickname—something cringeworthy like Simba or Goldie or Dodger—would that have been any better? Maybe sticking with his study designation helped remind us, on some subconscious level, that we would never really know his inner life. This creature never knew he was famous, and he had the right to exist on his own terms.
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The news came on a Sunday morning a week before Christmas: P-22 had died.
Officials said that he’d been suffering from multiple injuries, along with liver disease, heart disease, and kidney failure. Some of his health problems were from the car that had hit him, while others came from old age. So they euthanized him. Reading the news, I felt numb, underwater, with grief washing over me in distant waves. Our beloved mountain lion. Our beautiful neighbor.
The L.A. Times reports that throughout the whole process of catching P-22, evaluating him, and then putting him to sleep, no one from CDFW reached out to the Indigenous people of Los Angeles to get their input or guidance. After he died, officials announced that his body would be sent to the Natural History Museum to be studied. Rumors started circulating that they were going to taxidermy him and put him on display.
Eventually, though, after members of the Tongva, Chumash, Tataviam, and other native peoples started a campaign to have P-22’s body returned to Griffith Park, researchers agreed to work with them on laying him to rest. In January, the museum announced that tribal leaders had led a blessing ceremony to welcome him home to Los Angeles.
But those leaders had to fight for it, even though they’ve lived alongside mountain lions far longer than settlers have.
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In the last 10 years, 32 mountain lions have been killed trying to cross the 101 freeway north of Los Angeles. There’s a wildlife crossing that’s been in the works for decades, though, which will allow mountain lions and other animals to safely cross over the freeway. The California Department of Transportation finally broke ground on it in April 2022, and they’re expected to complete it in 2025.
It’s a start, but there’s so much more work to be done—on both a practical level and a soul level. I fear that even with the outpouring of grief across the city, most people still don’t care enough to correct the disastrous course we’ve set for ourselves. I hope I’m proven wrong.
At the Natural History Museum, staff members put out small sheets of paper so that visitors could write messages to P-22, and soon the entire exhibit was covered in love notes and remembrances. I saw on Instagram that researchers had tagged and named a new litter of mountain lions. Around us, the rains fall, the lions roam, and we stumble forward in this battered, determined land.
ASA WEST
is the author of Five Principles of Green Witchcraft (Gods and Radicals Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in Witches and Pagans Magazine, Luna Luna Magazine, and other outlets, and you can find her at https://linktr.ee/theredtailwitch.