The animals that had been acquired for Roar formed the core of the Shambala population. Over the subsequent decades, the preserve also accepted animals from other sources: lions and tigers surrendered by private owners who had acquired big cat cubs and discovered, as cubs always eventually do, that they grew up; animals transferred from circuses and traveling shows; animals that had been kept in inadequate conditions by people who had not understood what keeping a large predator in a domestic setting actually required. Among the animals that came to Shambala over the years were Michael Jackson’s Bengal tigers, Sabu and Thriller, transferred from the closed zoo at Neverland Valley Ranch.
The preserve became an accredited member of the American Sanctuary Association, an organization that sets standards for the care of large animals in captivity. It employs veterinarians, provides specialized diets, and maintains the infrastructure necessary to house large predators for the duration of their lives. The animals at Shambala are, in the preserve’s description, human-dependent — they cannot survive without the food and care provided by the preserve’s staff, because they have never developed the skills that wild animals of their species use to sustain themselves.
Hedren has been the preserve’s president and its most prominent advocate. The Shambala Preserve, in the arc of her life, represents the transformation of a project that was originally conceived as a filmmaking venture into something that looks, decades later, more like a permanent commitment to the care of animals whose captivity she was responsible for initiating.