I'm very far from the sterotypical "tree hugging hippie eco-terrorist" type, but even I read this, and can't help but feel a certain bit of misanthropy. I mean.. we do kinda suck. That's not to say that I'm advocating for anarcho-primitivism or "returning the planet to the animals" or anything. But it sure seems like we should be able to do better. Ya know?
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.
> 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.
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.
Relocation isn't a great solution unfortunately. Doubly so for an older sick animal like him. The most common outcomes are that the lion gets in a fight to the death with the younger males he's competing with, he starves, or he makes the trek back to his home territory.
I think I'd rather take that chance than live full of rat poison and mange and alone. It seems like he was left here to make humans happy, which is messed up.
> 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.
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.
> I'm very far from the sterotypical "tree hugging hippie eco-terrorist" type, but even I read this, and can't help but feel a certain bit of misanthropy.
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?
Submitted title said "has died". I've replaced it with "put to sleep" for now, which at least makes clear that he didn't just "die".
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
I think HN can handle “was euthanized” but yeah it’s a tough situation to do justice to. I lived right by Griffith Park from a few years ago up until very recently, and this was deeply sad news.
Mountain lions are not as much of an apex predator as their namesake seems to suggest. Attacks on humans are exceedingly rare especially considering how many of them live in close proximity to humans. You won’t see them during the day (and if you, get far away from it) but you may see them at night, usually on trail cameras. If you are walking around mountain lion country at night, you are very likely being watched closely. I try not to think about it when I’m up at my cabin.
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.
I've lived in the Canadian bush and have been up close with deer, elk, moose, bobcats and bears. Of all those the moose are easily the most impressive and depending on the season can be quite dangerous, bears are obviously not the best to come across either. All of that multiplied by 10 if they have young. But I've never seen a big cat the size of a mountain lion in the wild and even though they may be shy I'm not sure if the lizard part of my brain would be sufficiently convinced of that.
P-22 had multiple skull fractures and ruptured internal organs from an automobile collision, whose driver reported the accident, days earlier. I read that earlier today...which is of course terribly sad.
Considering he was down to 90 lbs from 123 in 2012, had a cracked skull and herniated diaphragm from an apparent recent car crash, I'd say he was euthanized
> "I told him I was so sorry that we did not make the world a safer place for him," said Beth Pratt of the National Wildlife Federation, who was present for P-22's final moments.
> 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.
Green bridges are a thing that could exist. I remember reading about them some time ago, thinking about how they could help prevent deer strikes on the roads where I live.
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.
>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.
It's not just animals; America has a long history of using highways to do exactly this to marginalized/poor communities.
> 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.
This seems like a very apt description of what urban freeways and car-centric planning in general does to urban areas.
Habitat destruction and breaking up habitat into excessively small, unconnected spaces is a big issue:
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.
In this city full of transients, P-22 was a true Angeleno. Sleep well, big kitty, and thank you for everything you’ve done for local wildlife awareness.
Please write to your Congress people in support of wildlife crossings [1]! Here in California especially, much of our infrastructure is aging and needs to be rebuilt in the coming decade. This is the perfect time to get wildlife crossings into the political zeitgeist so that every large highway and road infrastructure project sets aside funds to build either cut and cover wildlife crossings [2] or raised crossing [3].
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)
There's a ~$90 million wildlife crossing that started construction earlier this year in Agoura Hills, CA [1] where apparently many mountain lions try to cross.
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.
I feel this is suffering from the typical US problem that public infrastructure does either not get built at all or in a super expensive way. There must be ways to build these crossings way cheaper than 90 million and place them in more locations. They only have to hold animals that at best weight a few hundred pounds.
> They only have to hold animals that at best weight a few hundred pounds.
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.
People on NextDoor are complaining about their children and tiny pets. Afraid that the Mountain Lion will come for them. I send them real estate links in DTLA...
I don‘t think it‘s as trivial. I‘m definitely no wildlife expert, but the wildlife crossing that are built over here are wide bridges with a lot of greenery growing on it, so that it feels more like a small hill with a tunnel through it. And I‘d assume that there‘s reasons to build them that way - other than „all wildlife experts agree that it‘s more beautiful.“ I can imagine that some species of wildlife just don‘t crawl through culverts - or even may not fit. Can you imagine a deer getting on it‘s knees and squeeze through, antlers and all? I can‘t.
Culverts come in all sizes, even 10 foot diameter ones.
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.
It's good to be curious on Hacker News, but I have to ask if you have experience in this area or are just saying things that sound reasonable to you? Despite not being an expert, I happened to hear the opposite a while back, and doing a little bit of research seems to agree that predators do not actually do this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67340-8. I understand the concern of "why could this possibly take $90 million, the animals don't care anyways" but I am sure that more thought has been put into this than just sticking corrugated metal culverts every so often.
The bit about predators hanging around the only access across a highway I saw in a documentary. Mountain lions would hang around under a bridge over a stream. It's the same reason predators hang around water holes, etc. They aren't stupid.
> 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.
My dad in the AF once saw that engineers devised an elaborate draining system so a highway could be built across a swamp. He suggested instead they bulldoze a berm and build the highway on that.
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.
Given the multitude of problems facing California this is an asinine thing to focus on. Rather than hoping for a celebrity mountain lion in your neighborhood you should probably focus on the problems endangering humans in your state.
Here's the thing: sometimes focus itself is the first step towards any progress, which serves as a toe-hold which can branch out from the most seemingly silly exercises to what you really feel is a priority.
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.
Is the same focus. Pumas would reduce the number of deer collisions that kill many people each year. Thus, they are making the roads safer for people. Saving lifes and property.
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.
Californians seem too be doing fine compared to where you live since that seems to be populated with people who think humans are unable to work towards more than one goal at a time. No wonder California is the home to do many advanced industries and companies, the people there have a superpower!
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.
The value and worthiness is subjective, I'd support astronomical expenses and hardship humans to improve wildlife habitat because I think its important and care about it more than most other possible things to spend money on. The reason that makes sense to me is that we have no way of bringing extinct species back, and we are killing them off at record speed. The different life forms on our planet are absolutely amazing, why shouldn't we do everything in our power, for any cost, to replenish and improve habitat for them so they can survive for our descendants to see?
why shouldn't we do everything in our power, for any cost, to replenish and improve habitat for them so they can survive for our descendants to see
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.
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.
No I was simply using strong language to suggest that I feel strongly about it. I'm not sure where to draw the line but as a concrete example, I'd consider voting for a law which created a large tax to fund biodiversity protection. Say 10% of income for high earners, or perhaps a corporate tax, etc etc. At the end of the day its almost an aesthetic decision, I'd like to live in a world with high biodiversity and where humans are well integrated with nature, where there's animal crossings over roads and all kinds of ridiculous things like that, and I'd be willing to pay for it with some non-trivial amount. Anyway, I'm commenting on hacker news, don't take me too seriously.
You would appreciate Paris' "coulée verte". This is a 4.7 km (2.9 miles) path following an old railway and is above other roads, intersections, etc.[1]
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]
See the youtube channel Not Just Bikes[1], specifically videos like
- "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.
Every highway wildlife crossing has been enormously expensive. But it can be pretty cheap and easy. Just put a culvert crossways under the highway. Various sizes of culvert can be used. Cheap enough to put one every thousand feet or so. Install them when the highway is being repaved anyway.
With the exception of a new-account troll, it's really heartening to see all the positive comments here. I clicked through expecting that, but also expecting to read a bit less compassion, and a bit more "these are human spaces" type comments. Nudges my faith-in-humanity meter up a little bit to see advocacy around wildlife crossings and just making human spaces respect wildlife more.
More than a decade ago there was a video report on tv where a young adult cow was euthanized on the grounds that it is illegal to keep unlicensed "livestock" or something to that effect. The family had rescued and taken care of this creature and the government just killed it for no other reason but following protocol.
I honestly believe we are the worst. Not sure if it's cultural thing or most of us are plain evil
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.
Ok, so P-22 was isolated in the Griffith Park area, and in 2014 they captured him for treatment for health issues.
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?
I'm not an expert but I've read that relocating them is hard because they're so territorial and there's not like an abundance of wilderness left to put him. He probably would have been killed by a younger mountain lion by now if he was in a more wilderness territory.
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.
Wow, no one believed me when I said I encountered a mountain lion in my hiking trail. I even started to think I had imagined it. I never even heard of p-22. Secretly... I stopped going in this trail.
I saw a mountain lion once at the edges of my farm. I was up there rather early..but it was darker than usual. I was going to be hanging around by the outer fence until the sun came out stronger.
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.
I hate Californian style development so much it's unreal. The fact that they're STILL building new urban sprawl is disgusting. We will not be forgiven for sacrificing the Earth on an alter of Targets and single family homes
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[ 605 ms ] story [ 4044 ms ] threadLocal 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.
- 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".
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.
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?
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
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.
> 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?
0 - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63957074
> 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.
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.
It's not just animals; America has a long history of using highways to do exactly this to marginalized/poor communities.
This seems like a very apt description of what urban freeways and car-centric planning in general does to urban areas.
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.
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...
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...
It's measured in billions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
- "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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes/videos
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-...
(https://youtu.be/Avo0-8GvBlA)
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.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/cougar-town/
Humans are just a cancer on this planet.
I honestly believe we are the worst. Not sure if it's cultural thing or most of us are plain evil
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?
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...
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.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/cougar-town/