Mountain lion P-22 is euthanized, wildlife officials say
P-22, the famous Griffith Park mountain lion that captured hearts in Los Angeles and beyond, was euthanized Saturday morning after wildlife experts determined the injured animal was suffering from serious health issues.
“This really hurts,” California Department of Fish and Wildlife director Chuck Bonham said Saturday morning while fighting back tears. “It’s been an incredibly difficult several days, and for myself, I’ve felt the entire weight of the city of Los Angeles on my shoulders.”
The mountain lion was caught Monday, Dec. 12 in the backyard of a Los Feliz home and taken to a wild animal care facility for a full health evaluation in the wake of several recent attacks on pet dogs, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. He was severely underweight and hurt.
P-22 was evaluated by the San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s wildlife health team, which gave the big cat a physical exam, organ function tests and an infectious disease screening.
They found that P-22 had suffered traumatic injuries, including skull fractures, a wounded right eye and organs pushed into his chest cavity, Dr. Hendrik Nollens said. Officials suspect he was hit by a vehicle sometime on Sunday, Dec. 11.
Tests also showed P-22 had Stage 2 kidney failure and advanced liver disease, and may have had heart disease, and could experience heart failure, Nollen said.
The decision to compassionately euthanize the cat began to move into finality late Thursday night into Friday morning, Bonham said.
“This cascading evidence began to layer on top of severe trauma…and it just created a situation of compounding effects,” he said. “I made the decision that the right thing to do was to bring peace now rather than have P-22 continue through what would not have been acceptable from a compassionate level in my mind.”
P-22’s rise to prominence skyrocketed in 2013 after a now-iconic photo series by National Geographic photographer Steve Winter captured the big cat standing in front of the Hollywood sign, and he was dubbed the “Hollywood Cat.”
But the mountain lion was first identified in 2012 through one of the Griffith Park Connectivity Study’s wildlife cameras.
The park’s conservation effort had been documenting wildlife crossing via one of the overpass bridges of the Hollywood Freeway in Cahuenga Pass. Wildlife biologist Miguel Ordeñana, flipping through hundreds of motion-triggered photos, was awestruck when he came across images of the then 3-year-old mountain lion on a rugged ridgeline just above Ford Theatre.
The cougar’s discovery made history as the first photographic evidence of a mountain lion roaming in the 4,300-acre Griffith Park.
In the years that followed, he became a symbol for wildlife conservation efforts and the NPS’s mountain lion-tracking effort, with books, television series and murals paying tribute to the big cat.
P-22, now one of many in Southern California tracked by National Park Service researchers, typically stuck to his small territory of roughly six square miles in the park, but gained additional notoriety among wildlife experts after successfully managing to cross both the 405 and 101 freeways to reach his roaming grounds.
In 2014 during a recapture to replace batteries in his GPS tracking collar, the cat was found suffering from mange and had been exposed to poison from eating animals caught in residential rodent traps. He was treated and returned to Griffith Park, where he continued to successfully hunt his natural prey of mule deer, though experts at the time worried if he would ever fully recover.
Two years later, he became a prime suspect in the killing of a koala at the Los Angeles Zoo. In recent months, authorities said, he killed a chihuahua on a leash with its owner near the Hollywood reservoir and reportedly attacked and injured another chihuahua in Silver Lake.
Beth Pratt, California regional executive director for the National Wildlife Federation, said a memorial for P-22 would be planned after the holidays.
This story is developing.