Two wildlife advocacy groups have petitioned California to grant endangered species status to the state’s mountain lions to help protect them from encroachments that threaten to drive them to extinction.

“Our mountain lions are dying horrible deaths from car collisions and rat poison, and their populations are at risk from inbreeding,” warned Tiffany Yap, a biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, which presented the petition with the Mountain Lion Foundation. “Without a clear legal mandate to protect mountain lions from the threats that are killing them and hemming them in on all sides, these iconic wild cats will soon be gone from Southern California.”

The striking apex predators that roam the hills of Southern California are critical to the region’s ecosystem yet are increasingly threatened by development and a crisscross snare of highways. If cars don’t kill the animals, the roadways tend to keep populations isolated, significantly reducing mating opportunities and the big cats’ genetic diversity, which affects their health.

The latest big cat wandering dangerously close to human development was an apparently healthy year-old female spotted wandering around a trailer park in the Santa Monica Mountains earlier this week. The mountain lion, weighing about 50 pounds, has been dubbed P-75.

Peter Tira, a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, speculated that the young female likely left her mother recently. “These lions often are the ones that get lost, take a wrong turn, end up in a populated area ... and sometimes need help getting back to wild habitat,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

Fish and Wildlife officials and the National Park Service outfitted P-75 with a tracking collar before she was released into the mountains away from housing developments.