P-22 has been euthanized
bbc.com
bbc.com
Out here in East County San Diego we've got much more open space for our mountain lion population but they often face the same difficulty safely crossing the I8. Thankfully, even though they eat lots of farm animals every year (one mountain lion ate my neighbor's goat last year!), everyone tries really hard to scare them away without harming them (and especially avoid poisoning them)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_crossing
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Wildlife...
[3] https://discoverapega.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Photo-co...
- "Why the Dutch wait less at traffic lights" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knbVWXzL4-4 argues that American traffic engineering is optimised for car movement, at the expense of pedestrians and bikes, whereas Dutch traffic engineering is to minimise conflict between vehicles and maximise movement of people overall. Leading to more complex but more efficient intersections.
- "The Dutch solution for safer sidewalks - continuous sidewalks" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OfBpQgLXUc has crossings at junctions where cars and people intersect designed so the cars visibly have to travel over the sidewalk through the people's area, instead of designed so the people have to visibly travel over the road, through the car's area.
- "Crossing the street shouldn't be dangerous, but it is" [in North America] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ByEBjf9ktY talking about length of crossings on wide road, traffic signals, priorities, etc.
It is really wonderful (well, outside winter maybe) - and these are the words of someone who dislikes Paris very much.
Another one is the southern one, much longer (14 km = 8.7 miles), excellent for biking.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coul%C3%A9e_verte_Ren%C3%A9-Du... [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promenade_d%C3%A9partementale_... (in French)
Hopefully, we can start removing those highways and undo that damage and make larger parts of our cities vibrant places to live again.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-...
It wouldn't have helped P22 since there's many roads and freeways in the 30 miles between Griffith Park, where P22 lived, and Agoura Hills but there's some progress in helping mountain lions in the area.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallis_Annenberg_Wildlife_Cros...
Uhm. I think there is some misunderstanding here. These wildlife crossings are more than just a plank going over the road. They are basically a bridge with a small patch of forest on them (or whatever vegetation matches the surrounding area).
> To encourage use by wildlife, the bridge will have lush but drought-tolerant vegetation with matte materials to deflect bright headlights and insulation to quiet the roar of cars. Fencing at each end will help funnel them onto the crossing.
I don’t know what is the fair price of a 165-foot-wide (50 m) and 200-foot-long (61 m) overpass holding up a small forest, but I know that the additional weight of the animals crossing is not a significant factor in it at all.
Now obviously if we could convince wildlife to use something much narrower and simpler built like a pedestrian bridge maybe we could drive down the costs, i’m not sure if that has been tested or not.
One issue with narrow passages is that predators may learn to take advantage of them, eventually driving other wildlife away.
It's measured in billions.
https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/as-banffs-famed-wildl...
The problem with throwing $90 million dollars to build one is you cannot build very many at those prices. That means that predators will know they can hang around them picking off any herbivores that try to cross.
Culverts of various sizes can be placed - animals come in various sizes.
> I am sure that more thought has been put into this
I am not. Sometimes it takes someone outside the industry to see the obvious. And besides, SpaceX figured out how to launch rockets at what, 10% of the cost of NASA?
I saw a documentary once on one of those zillion dollar animal crossings, and the activists and designers simply went ape over it like they were building the Taj Mahal.
Highways are built over culverts all the time. They know how to do it. It doesn't cost $100,000,000 to do it. They don't even have to raise the highway - the highway is often raised up already on a berm of dirt to keep it from flooding.
That reduced the cost by about 95%, and they adopted it.
Note that the civil engineers working on it all failed to see the simpler, vastly cheaper option.
you don't really mean what you've said, everything in our power? for any cost?... If we literally spent every bit of cash we had to do as you say and maximize biodiversity, our descendents would survey the biodiversity while wearing animal skins and hunter gathering and striving to someday reinvent agriculture, fertilizers, pesticides, and internal combustion engines.
yes, i'm not being serious. neither were you.
the money you pay your housekeeper? part of the economy. you cleaning your own house? not part of the economy.
your point is valid, that it "has a value" and the economy "depends on it", and there are economists and critics who have said "we need to fix this", but definitionally economics at present is what it is and isn't what it isn't.
I say this considering a friend who once lamented the early space program was a waste of money, as he wore his advanced polymer clothing at work on microprocessors and GPS satellite and RF communication advances.
It felt pretty ironic.
It’s not like the LAPD is going to be ushering mountain lions across the highway. And biologists/environmentalists aren’t going to be fixing crimes of poverty.
Moreover, each time there is a car crash, somebody in the road must allocate resources to clean and deal with it. Call the police, ambulances... This is expensive also. Less collisions for the city means having more money for another needs.
The specie's habitats have been choked off by California's freeways. Though as many as 6,000 mountain lions live in California, researchers believe the population in the Santa Monica Mountains... could die out in 50 years...
The great slashes of asphalt also make journeys to new homes potentially deadly. In September, a pregnant mountain lion was struck and killed when she tried to cross a Malibu highway, which bisects a key swathe of habitat. She and her four unborn cubs all had traces of rat poison in their systems.
And suddenly, I was face to face with a mountain lion. I have never seen anything so gorgeous up close and I was terrified. I didn’t know if I should maintain eye contact or back off. I literally couldn’t form a thought at that moment. The eyes were mesmerizing and I wasn’t sure if I couldn’t break off eye contact because he was pinning me down with his eyes.
And just like that, he(or she?) abruptly broke the gaze and walked away. To this day, I wonder if it was real. I don’t think I can actually explain how I felt but I can ‘replay’ the feeling when I remember that chilly foggy morning.
I have seen wildlife upclose before. My other favourite memory was when I was a young chef and I had a very short stint at a (very famous) restaurant in London near Hyde Park. It was my double shift and I was dead tired that I ran across the empty road to the bus stop. And just like that..a red fox emerged from nowhere..we had a moment and he dashed off.
I remember that moment. It brings forth delight in me everytime I think about that early morning hello. I see lynxes and bobcats and coyotes in my outdoor cam all the time. But I still cannot…simply.can.not..articulate that feeling of gazing into that mountain lion’s eyes. What a gorgeous magnificent creature!
I wonder what it thought of me and if I made a favourable impression.
I would like human beings to share this planet with the others who have the rightful ownership and deserve to thrive.
Why not release him in an area where there were other mountain lions, so he can get freaky with a female, and he would not be isolated?
Why was returning him to an area where he will continue to be isolated in a relatively small area, with contaminated prey and no chance of mating, the best choice for the animal?
There was the thought maybe he'd cross back to the Santa Monica mountains, maybe a female would cross over to Griffith park.
He wasn't a problem until the very end, then he was caught and found to be in rough shape, probably suffering. FWIW, coyotes kill more pets but are afaik only killed when they get too familiar with humans or are aggressive.
https://abc7.com/chihuahua-killed-granada-hills-caught-on-vi...
P-22 jumped a pretty high fence at a LA zoo & left with an entire koala in its mouth.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-cougar-koala-...
The zoo spokesperson did not blame the mountain lion for doing predatory mountain lion things.
Californian condor was almost extinct by poison and rescued at the last second, but we don't learn anything valuable it seems.
Local prey - coyotes, raccoons, and other small animals - are laced with the rat poison that has become ubiquitous around Los Angeles.
In 2014, camera traps spotted P-22 looking ill and officials hauled him in for treatment. A mugshot of P-22 looking grizzled and bemused quickly went viral, but the cause was no joke. He was found to be full of rat poison and consumed by mange - conditions that kill most mountain lions.
The great slashes of asphalt also make journeys to new homes potentially deadly. In September, a pregnant mountain lion was struck and killed when she tried to cross a Malibu highway, which bisects a key swathe of habitat. She and her four unborn cubs all had traces of rat poison in their systems.
Once, Mr Ordeñana captured a video of P-22 making plaintive mating calls. They would never be answered; the freeways and development surrounding Griffith Park guaranteed he was walled off from any potential females and would never reproduce.
It’s not either or. You can be a normal person and still wish human societies didn’t pour so much time, effort, and money into destroying the planet for greed and convenience.
You are allowed to have a negative view of cars without being a zealot.
If anything, this actually makes you a well adjusted human being. Who in their right mind would wish for more pollution, more highways, more destruction, and less wildlife? But this is still portrayed as an extremist, irrational point of view because it makes it easier to dismiss. It’s big oil’s playbook for global warming. Although it’s becoming a more accepted point of view, we’re still ways off. What if it’s already too late?
As much as P-22 ended up being a sort of local celebrity, I wonder if it would have been more humane to relocate him to somewhere he could interact with other mountain lions, not to mention that it may have been safer for him, too.
Sure, ideally we build spaces that are safer for wildlife in the first place, but that ship had already sailed in this particular area, and any positive changes would have come far too late for P-22. He might be still alive (and happier) in a different place, even if it might have been an adjustment for him.
The "relocate large predator that often maintains a territory of 100 square miles" would likely be a net loss for both the relocated and whatever mountain lions are in that area.
- Some places don't need buildings or roads. The intersection of rich people and wildlife habitats is interesting.
- If there must be roads, like highways, we should study ways to get wildlife under or over them.
I'm curious what could be done, but just slap this on an ever-growing list in my head of "things that should change in California".
> The great slashes of asphalt also make journeys to new homes potentially deadly. In September, a pregnant mountain lion was struck and killed when she tried to cross a Malibu highway, which bisects a key swathe of habitat. She and her four unborn cubs all had traces of rat poison in their systems.
> Once, Mr Ordeñana captured a video of P-22 making plaintive mating calls. They would never be answered; the freeways and development surrounding Griffith Park guaranteed he was walled off from any potential females and would never reproduce.
That all hits hard.
I feel like a raging narcissist every time I'm on a road and especially on highways. On highways, it's especially clear to me as they often separate more natural landscapes (mainly because people want trees to stave off some sound from the highway). But driving down them, and especially when seeing animals on the highway dead or alive, I'm just filled with sadness that we take away wildlife's freedom and mobility. Imagine some other being just straight up divided a city, a state, or a country, forever cutting you off from family, friends, recreation, food (that your life depends on), etc. unless you are able to pass through a gauntlet of high-speed machines that confuse and blind you and scale walls and valleys.
It's not just animals; America has a long history of using highways to do exactly this to marginalized/poor communities.
https://www.thelocal.de/20130918/51975/
https://germanyinusa.com/2021/05/13/green-bridges-help-anima...
Some information on trying to establish a wildlife corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon.
There are a number of wildlife crossings that I recall up in Canada near Banff - and that shows some pictures of them.
And on the "how does it change things?"
> DO PREDATORS USE THESE CROSSINGS LIKE TRAPS? A common question about crossings and fencing is if predators use the corridors to more easily trap prey. The short answer is no.
> Between 2012 and 2015, researchers from University of Alberta looked into this idea in a series of 17 crossings in Quebec’s Laurentides Wildlife Reserve.
> After examining photos of more than 11,000 mammals using wildlife underpasses, they did not find any evidence of predators taking advantage of the crossing design to capture their dinner.
> Additional evidence shows that the carnivores, including wolves, coyotes or lynx, did not follow prey into the passages, either. So it appears these crossings do not provide the easy meal they might seem to.
This seems like a very apt description of what urban freeways and car-centric planning in general does to urban areas.
Humans are just a cancer on this planet.
Call me “a troll” - but in all honesty what is even the point of such a comment?
We could just as well call state land management of wild lands to blame here. Not dissimilar, we have state mismanagement allowing for dead wood build up and wildfires rip through to devastating effect.
In my own state and town, we have nuisance flooding. We always (for some value of always) have. Coincidentally, these flood-prone areas are all fill-in of low-land salt marshes that were the run-off areas for the rain water. We’ve covered every bit of land with development and surprisingly, it is now “climate change” to blame and not piss poor management of land.
Have you considered that both might be important factors?
I honestly believe we are the worst. Not sure if it's cultural thing or most of us are plain evil
Although it's a euphemism (an appalling one really), it at least conveys the context, which is that wildlife professionals did it, and say it was for reasons of humaneness.
Edit: switched to the less euphemistic wording suggested by notduncansmith below
> The National Park service confirmed that P-22 was responsible for killing a chihuahua that was being walked in the Hollywood hills last month.
No queationing humaneness aspect of putting to sleep, however was the decision connected to the attack? From what I've read:
- P-22 was tracked and captured 5 days ago after confirming attacking a chihuahua in the Hollywood last month. - 5 days later P-22 was put to sleep
Would P-22 be put to sleep if there was no recent attack on chihuahua?
Does the obvious connection mean that the reason for putting to sleep was not "humaneness", but risk of attack on pets?
Unless they are literally starving, they are usually very timid and shy. Humans are especially terrifying to wildlife. We walk very tall, make a bunch of strange noises, we have tools, lights, automobiles, and otherwise signal that we are the apex predator.