The Big Cat Public Safety Act that was eventually signed into law in December 2022 — more than fifty years after the LIFE photographs were taken, and nearly twenty years after Hedren’s first significant legislative advocacy — prohibits the keeping of big cats as pets and bans cub petting operations. The law does not affect existing accredited sanctuaries like Shambala; it restricts the creation of new private ownership arrangements and the commercial operations that supply them. It is, in the legislative record, a bipartisan achievement; the House voted 278 to 134 in favor of it, and the Senate passed it with the signature of bipartisan sponsors.
The law’s context in popular culture includes the Netflix documentary Tiger King (2020), which brought the issue of private big cat ownership to a broad audience and generated public attention that supported the final push for federal legislation. Hedren’s advocacy predated Tiger King by decades; she had been making the case for federal restriction since at least 2003. The documentary was an accelerant for something she had already been working toward, and the law that resulted reflects the convergence of her long-term advocacy with the public attention that the documentary generated.
## Three Women, Three Careers, One Story
The through-line that connects the LIFE photographs of 1971 to the present is, in the most basic biographical terms, a story about three women across three generations: Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith, and Dakota Johnson. All three are actresses. All three have navigated the specific industry that the Sherman Oaks household was oriented around. And all three are connected to the Shambala Preserve — Hedren as founder and president, Griffith as member of the advisory board, and Johnson as her grandmother’s associate in the preserve’s ongoing operations.