Her advocacy extended over years and involved repeated engagement with Congress. She testified, she organized, she spoke publicly about what the domestic ownership of large cats actually looked like from the perspective of someone who had done it and who had built a sanctuary to manage the consequences. In 2003, she was involved in pushing a bill designed to stop the interstate trafficking of big cats as pets.
The Big Cat Public Safety Act, which became law in December 2022 after passing the House with a vote of 278 to 134, prohibits keeping big cats as pets and bans contact between big cats and the public. The law was not primarily Hedren’s legislative achievement — it was sponsored by bipartisan congressional coalitions and supported by multiple animal welfare organizations — but it represented the culmination of the kind of advocacy she had been doing for decades. The domestic arrangement that the LIFE photographs had documented in 1971 became, in 2022, something that was no longer legal to create.
## What Hedren Has Said About It
Tippi Hedren’s memoir, Tippi: A Memoir, was published in 2016 when she was eighty-six years old. The memoir covered both the Hitchcock years and the Roar production years, giving her accounts of both in her own voice at a distance of decades. The accounts she has given in interviews over the subsequent years have been consistent with the memoir’s general approach: direct about the danger, clear about the retrospective assessment, and disinclined to sentimentalize either the Hitchcock relationship or the lion domestic arrangement.