The three generations of the family do not, in the available public record, appear to have defined themselves primarily in relation to each other. Each has built a professional identity that stands on its own, independent of the others’. But the connection to Shambala — the sanctuary that Hedren built from the wreckage of the Roar project, that Griffith has supported, that Johnson has engaged with — is the physical place where the family story and the animal story converge.
## The Specific Grammar of Wild Animals in Domestic Space
One of the persistent difficulties in discussing the Hedren household at Sherman Oaks is the inadequacy of the available language. The categories that exist for describing human relationships with animals — pets, livestock, working animals, zoo animals, wild animals — do not capture what Neil was in that house. He was not a pet, in the sense that a dog or a cat is a pet: animals that have been selectively bred across thousands of years specifically to coexist with human domestic environments, whose behavioral and physiological characteristics have been shaped by that selective history. He was not a zoo animal, in the sense of an animal maintained behind barriers specifically to prevent human contact. He was not a working animal, in the sense of an animal trained to perform specific tasks under human direction.
He was a wild animal who had become accustomed, through sustained proximity, to a specific group of human beings in a specific place. His familiarity with the family was genuine, in the sense that familiarity is always genuine — formed by repeated contact, by the specific texture of individual human behavior, by whatever recognition a lion is capable of forming of the people it has spent time with. The photographs document this familiarity. It reads, in the images, as something close to domesticity: the lion on the bed, the lion in the pool, the lion being stepped over.