The foundation’s other major purpose — advocacy for legislation restricting private ownership of big cats — eventually produced concrete legislative results.
## What the Photographs Document and What They Don’t
The Michael Rougier photographs published in LIFE magazine are the most vivid existing record of what the Sherman Oaks household looked like during the period when Neil was part of it. They have been reproduced widely in the years since their original publication, accumulating meaning with each reproduction: articles about unusual pets, articles about dangerous celebrity choices, articles about the Roar film, articles about Hedren’s later advocacy work. They have acquired a cultural weight that goes beyond their original status as magazine photographs documenting a celebrity family’s unusual domestic arrangement.
What the photographs document is specific: moments, captured by a professional photographer, in which a four-hundred-pound lion occupied the same spaces as a family. The lion by the pool. The lion in the bedroom. The lion being stepped over on the kitchen floor. These are documented facts, in the sense that photographs of events are facts — they show what was visible from a particular angle at a particular moment.
What the photographs do not document is also important. They do not document the continuous experience of living with the animal, the moments between the photographed moments when the arrangement might have looked different. They do not document the family’s emotional experience of the arrangement — whether it felt ordinary to them after enough time had passed, whether there were moments of fear, whether the teenager in the bed photograph had chosen to be there or had woken to find the lion had joined her. They do not document what Neil was doing or thinking during the photographic session, or whether the session was representative of typical conditions.