An 11-year-old girl was attacked by a mountain lion Sunday evening while feeding chickens outside her family's home in the 32000 block of Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, prompting authorities to euthanize the animal and reigniting discussions about human-wildlife coexistence in Southern California.
The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Lost Hills Station responded to the incident, treating the girl at the scene before her family transported her to a hospital for injuries that were not life-threatening.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife was brought in to oversee the investigation and was able to kill the animal.
This latest attack marks another concerning incident in the Santa Monica Mountains region, where mountain lions and humans increasingly share space along the urban-wildland interface.
This weekend’s Malibu attack follows a troubling pattern of mountain lion encounters with young children in the greater Los Angeles area. In September 2024, a mountain lion attacked a 5-year-old boy during a family picnic at Malibu Creek State Park in broad daylight. The lion grabbed the child by the head and began dragging him away before family members and nearby adults charged at the cougar, yelling until it dropped the boy and climbed a tree. Park rangers later euthanized the one-year-old female lion, which was found to be underweight and possibly inexperienced or desperate.
In August 2021 in Calabasas, a 65-pound mountain lion attacked a 5-year-old boy playing in his front yard. The lion dragged the child about 45 yards across the lawn, inflicting wounds to his head and upper body, before the boy's mother fought off the animal with her bare hands. Wildlife officers found the lion behaving aggressively nearby and shot it on sight.
Despite the recent incidents, mountain lion attacks on humans remain extremely rare, with only roughly two dozen verified attacks in California over the past 40 years and just a handful of fatalities statewide since 1986.
The Santa Monica Mountains host a small but resilient population of mountain lions that face significant survival challenges. Biologists estimate only 10-15 adult and subadult mountain lions live in the range at any given time, making each animal critical to the population's survival.
Since 2002, the National Park Service has monitored over 100 mountain lions in and around the Santa Monica range using GPS collars, providing detailed insights into their behavior and population dynamics. The research reveals a population under severe stress from habitat fragmentation and human-related dangers.
The Santa Monica Mountains effectively function as a "habitat island," surrounded by the Pacific Ocean to the south and hemmed in by major highways—the 101 to the north and the 405 to the east—along with dense urban development. This isolation has created the lowest genetic diversity observed in western mountain lions, comparable only to the critically inbred Florida panthers of the 1990s.
Human-caused deaths pose the greatest threat to these lions. At least 32 cougars have been killed by vehicles in the study area since 2002, making car strikes a leading cause of mortality. Rodenticide poisoning presents another major danger—28 of 29 local lions tested had anticoagulant rat poisons in their systems, with seven dying directly from internal bleeding caused by these toxins.
Conservation efforts are underway to address the population's isolation. The groundbreaking Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is under construction at Liberty Canyon over the 101 Freeway, slated to open by late 2025. This vegetated bridge will allow mountain lions and other wildlife to safely cross between the Santa Monica Mountains and wilderness areas to the north, potentially boosting genetic diversity and reducing roadkill deaths.