Beth Pratt says Farewell to P 22

 

Dear Friends, Our beloved P-22 has been laid to rest in the Santa Monica Mountains, a collaboration between local Indigenous partners, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and the National Park Service. The burial location will not be revealed to protect and preserve the site.  I was honored to be invited to attend by our Indigenous partners and full of so much gratitude to them for their beautiful and moving ceremony that showed such reverence and respect for this remarkable animal. The affecting songs and tributes helped me achieve some measure of peace, although I struggled the entire time to hold it together and wasn’t always successful.  I can also imagine P-22 at peace now, which such a powerful and caring send off to the next place. As we laid him to rest, a red-tailed hawk flew overhead and called loudly, perhaps there to help him on his journey. P-22 changed the world. People all over the globe connected to him, and he connected us to each other. But more importantly, he helped create a new modern ethic toward wildlife, one that values wildlife as fellow beings, worthy of our respect and compassion, an understanding and wisdom that has always been a value of Indigenous people, as my friend, Alan Salazar, Band of Mission Indians Elder, Chumash, Tataviam, & Pipimaram lineages once shared, “Indigenous people have used the animals as teachers for thousands of years.”  For me, P-22 will always be with us, and his legacy will continue in helping people build new relationships with wildlife, less about dominance, and more about us realizing we are inextricably linked to the same natural world, and considering our fellow wild neighbors as “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth,” as Henry Beston once wrote. As I drove home from the burial, a verse from a Mary Oliver poem occurred to me: “…To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” Rest in peace, P-22.   With kindness,             Beth Pratt Regional Executive Director, California, National Wildlife Federation Leader, #SaveLACougars Campaign