Los Angeles used to hunt mountain lions

Grizzly bears and mountain lions used to roam the Los Angeles area before all these people showed up. It's only now that there are four million of us here that Angelenos have decided that a cougar in our midst is charming and cute. No matter how bleak the long-term situation may be for P-22 himself, sadly.

In a piece for the KCET website, Nathan Masters revisits The Great Los Angeles Lion Hunt of 1892. Excerpt:

Fourteen hounds, at least a dozen men on horseback, and many more on foot or in horse-drawn coaches, assembled near the Chavez Ravine brick factory on the morning of December 29, 1892. Holding the reins of a tally-ho was the hunt's organizer, Colonel Griffith J. Griffith, the man who four years later would donate Griffith Park to the city and eleven years later would shoot his wife in the eye in a fit of drunken rage. Next to Griffith sat another self-styled colonel, Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, along with other members of the press -- all of them armed at Griffith's expense with rifles and ammunition.

This was no ordinary hunt, the target no mere fox. The hunting party had more fearsome prey in mind: two mountain lions seen prowling days before through Elysian Park.

The Southland was then a wilder place -- a few grizzly bears still clung to survival in the nearby mountains -- but the appearance of two large cougars so close to the city raised alarms. The Times fretted that the "California lions" would "pervert their appetite...by eating the strollers on Lovers' Lane or occasional stray children." The Times' rival, the Los Angeles Herald, was no less sensationalistic. "Lions in the City," its headline cried.

In fact, the real reason for the hunt was that the lions (if there were actually two -- mountain lions are typically solitary creatures) had feasted upon one too many of Frank McCrea's pigs in the hills of Griffith's Rancho Los Feliz. As McCrea's landlord, Griffith was determined to eliminate the threat to his ranch's livestock.

By the way, the latest example of the national media being infatuated with a lion roaming wild in the city limits of Los Angeles is on the New Yorker website. LA's Loneliest Lion, they call it.