This is the specific complexity of the position: the woman who housed a lion in her family’s home, whose daughter shared a bed with the animal, who oversaw a film production that injured more than seventy people, is also the woman who built a sanctuary for rescued big cats and who advocated for the federal legislation that made it illegal for anyone else to do what she had done. The photographs and the advocacy are not separate chapters with a clear moral dividing line between them. They are connected — the photographs explain why the advocacy was needed, and the advocacy reflects what the photographs actually showed.
## The Animals as Permanent Residents
The Shambala Preserve’s current residents include African lions, Siberian tigers, Bengal tigers, leopards, servals, mountain lions, bobcats, a lynx, a Florida panther, and a liger. Most of them are animals who were born in captivity and have never lived in the wild — animals whose existence in the preserve is the only existence they have known or can know, because they do not have the behavioral equipment to survive in wild conditions.
The elephant Timbo, who appeared in Roar and who was kept at the preserve after the film’s completion, lived at Shambala until his death in 2005 at the age of approximately forty-eight years. Elephants in captivity can live to their mid-fifties; Timbo’s lifespan was within the range of what is documented for captive elephants. His companion Kura died in 2000 at approximately forty-one.
The lions and tigers that formed the core of the Roar production’s animal cast are long deceased; large cats in captivity typically live between fifteen and twenty years, meaning that the animals who were on the Sherman Oaks property in 1971 and on the Acton ranch during the 1970s would have died in the 1980s and 1990s at the latest. Neil, the lion in the LIFE photographs, does not appear in the available record after the domestic period; his fate after the photographs is not documented in the sources consulted for this article.