P-47: The Santa Monica Mountains Lion Likely Killed by Rat Poison

P-47 on a trail camera in the Santa Monica Mountains. NPS.

P-47 was a male mountain lion studied by National Park Service biologists in the Santa Monica Mountains near Los Angeles.

A lion from new blood

He was one of only two known offspring of P-45, a male who made national news in 2016 after killing numerous alpacas in one weekend; a livestock owner obtained a permit to kill him, then withdrew it. DNA showed P-45 had come from north of the 101 Freeway, so his kittens — P-47 and his sister P-46 — brought new genetic diversity to the isolated population south of it. P-45 is believed dead.

Tracked from the den

• Biologists first marked P-47 at the den, at about four weeks old.
• In January 2017, the night they recaptured his mother P-19 to replace her collar, they also caught P-47 and fitted him with a GPS collar. He was 14 months old and weighed 108 pounds.
• A New Yorker reporter on that capture described a cat nearly seven feet from nose to tail, with a thick mustard-colored coat flecked with black, paws as big as a spread hand, and soft white fur under the neck.
• At his last capture, in January 2018, he weighed exactly 150 pounds — like his father, tied for the largest lion in the study's history.

Death by poison

On March 21, 2019, his collar sent a mortality signal, and biologists hiked in to find his body in the central part of the range. He had no visible wounds. Tests on his liver found six different anticoagulant compounds — the ingredients of rat poison — and a necropsy by the California Animal Health and Food Safety Lab found internal bleeding in his head and lungs. He was three years old.

How he was poisoned is not known. Researchers think mountain lions are exposed secondhand or thirdhand: by eating an animal that ate the bait, such as a ground squirrel, or an animal that ate such an animal, such as a coyote.

Sources

Based on "Puma Profiles: P-47," Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The New Yorker description is paraphrased.