“Three mountain lion kittens born last month in the Santa Monica Mountains were inbred, a wildlife expert said, marking a troubling sign for a population penned in by the urban sprawl of metropolitan Los Angeles.

Preliminary DNA tests indicate that the male and two females born in the Malibu Springs area were sired by an adult male and his daughter, the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area announced Thursday…Two other kittens born in 2012 were produced by the same mother and father, he said.

Over the years, researchers have found seven mountain lions that were the products of inbreeding…About a dozen pumas roam the area, but it’s a tight squeeze when adult male pumas typically each have huge territories, Riley said.

“Their movements are totally circumscribed by the freeway,” he said, noting that one young male was struck and killed by a car in October. The animal crossed eight lanes of roadway but couldn’t jump a 10-foot-high retaining wall topped with chain-link fencing.”

And what would you have done, penned in by the sea to one side, and the freeways of man on the other, seeing your father’s lands and your father’s father’s lands eaten up, even as the corpse of a great beast is eaten by lesser creatures and given over to insects and to rot? There were no females to take to wife, no fresh-eyed stranger to choose your bed willingly; only scared and starving sisters, so the sisters became wives became mothers became everything.

There were stories — there are always stories, as long as there are fools to tell them and greater fools to hear them — of others who would come to save us, long of limb and clear of eye would would restore our lands to the fulness of glory and turn ash back into wood. But no one ever came. Never let it be said we cannot do for ourselves. We make our own help, and the grave shall be our judge. Others in softer lands than ours may look down on us, for taking to wife the kin that shared our womb. Let them keep their soft lands and their soft hearts and their soft throats, and stay on their side of the Wall. We will keep our own wives, and our own counsel too. We are few here, but we are princes; aye, princes of mud and of blue-winged flies and of shit and of death. We will live through this — marry our daughters and bury our sons — and teach our tongues not to acquaint themselves with our hearts, and become strangers to grief and pity both. We will marry, and we will live.

We will marry our daughters and we will let the world burn into Hell around us.