The knowledge they acquired was real. People who spend extended time in close proximity to large predators develop a specific attentiveness — a sensitivity to the animal’s states and moods that is difficult to acquire any other way. The problem with this knowledge is that it is insufficient protection against the fundamental fact it is supposed to help you manage. A four-hundred-pound lion that is well-known to you is still a four-hundred-pound lion. Familiarity changes how you interact with the animal; it does not change what the animal is capable of.
Neil, by the account available, never harmed anyone in the family during the period of domestic cohabitation. This is a fact. It is also, as Hedren would later observe, not the point. The point is what could have happened, and the fact that it did not happen during this particular period with this particular animal is not a transferable guarantee about the next period with the next animal. The photographs document a moment in which the arrangement held. They do not document that the arrangement was safe.
Authorities eventually ordered the family to remove the big cats from their Sherman Oaks home. The neighborhood was not designed for large predators, and the neighbors were presumably not parties to the filmmaking vision that had motivated the arrangement. By 1972, the animals had been removed from the residential property, and the family began the process of acquiring larger land — eventually a property in Acton, in Los Angeles County’s Antelope Valley — that could accommodate the scale of what their film project was becoming.