Please Don't Celebrate Killing Of Mountain Lion

ACROSS COLORADO – By Beth Pratt for High Country News. I split my time between living outside Yosemite National Park and in Los Angeles. That I have the chance to see mountain lions in both places provides me with unending awe, and with hope: If a mountain lion can live in the middle of Los Angeles, wildness and wild things just might have a future on this planet after all.

I recently received a message about a famous cougar named P-22 that calls Los Angeles home, together with a well-known photo of the animal and the headline, “Man Says He Killed Mountain Lion After It Attacked Him on Colorado Trail.” At first, I took issue with the case of mistaken identity. In fact, P-22 is a model of coexistence, a predator that has lived in the second-largest city in the country since 2012 without threatening any of the 10 million people a year who recreate in Griffith Park — the lion’s own backyard.

As I learned more about the incident, though, I quickly became less concerned about P-22 being accused of crime he didn’t commit, and more about the pervasive and inaccurate frame of the story, which vilified the mountain lion — celebrating a bloodthirsty predator receiving justice in an against-all-odds heroic contest of man vs. beast. As I dug deeper, I discovered that most of the stories ignored the fact that the cougar in question was not even an adult, though the photos from almost every media outlet I saw showed fully grown lions, sometimes snarling, threatening-looking ones for dramatic effect. In fact, the animal was likely a starving youngster that weighed about 40 pounds and perhaps was not yet mature enough to even be independent from its mother. For perspective, I posted on Facebook a photo of myself with a kitten of the same size — Sam, Project Survival’s Cat Haven resident mountain lion.

READ MORE at The Colorado Independent