TOPANGA CANYON — A pride of 3 Mountain Lions were caught on home security footage, casually making their way through a Topanga Canyon neighborhood, on Thursday, October 16, in the early morning hours.
The security video, shown by CBSLA in an early morning broadcast, captured the triumvirate touring through a residential driveway striding Encina Road a little before 4 am.
The homeowner and original captor of the footage, in correspondence to CBSLA, stated that their home was not in the remote stretches of the Santa Monica mountains, but in fact more residentially located, underscoring the novelty of capturing the animal, purported to be so reclusive and avoidant towards human contact, on video.
Los Angeles County (which Topanga Canyon is a part of), along with Mumbai India, is the only megacity in the world where big cats live within its city limits. Years of cumulative urban development and anthropogenic environmental impacts with their habitats, mountain lions have suffered incalculable quantities of deleterious afflictions, which have directly affected their way of life, and have led to their classification as a “Highly Protected Mammal” in California, as a consequence. Pernicious banes, such as road and housing developments, have led to, with a joint UCLA and National Park Service study making the assertion, a possible extinction the Mountain Lion population could face in 50 years.
According to another National Park Service (NPS) study, hyper-toxic rat poisons known as ‘rodenticides’ have also played a large role in the threat to the Pumas’ well-being, with 23 out of 24 pumas in the study testing positive for the toxic compounds, and three of which, dying as a result. The severity of these affects have directly prompted California Governor, Gavin Newsom, to sign Assembly Bill 1788, the California Ecosystems Protection Act, on September 29, 2020, which bans the use of “second generation anticoagulant rodenticides”, the most harmful of the sort.
The NPS has studied and documented precisely 75 mountain lions in and around the Santa Monica mountains, and in the process demonstrated that dozens live and cohabitate within these areas. Through the NPS’ various bodies of research, it has been concluded that, for the time being Californian mountain lions do in fact have a stable population with healthy rates of survival and reproduction, and these facts, in tandem with the perpetually concerned Angelino citizen, such as those spearheading an $87 million wildlife crossing along the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills, project a positive outlook on the future of their survival.
