What the familiarity was not is equally important. It was not domestication, in the biological sense — the kind of behavioral modification across generations that produces the specific cognitive and emotional orientation toward humans that makes domestic dogs, for instance, different from wolves not just in training but in fundamental disposition. Neil was a lion who had learned specific associations with specific people. He had not been changed, at any level deeper than behavioral conditioning, into something other than a lion. The four hundred pounds of muscle and bone, the speed that Hedren later described, the capacity for the kind of attack that the Roar production documented repeatedly across different animals and different people — these remained fully intact underneath the layer of habituated familiarity that the photographs show.
This distinction is not a pedantic one. It is the distinction that Hedren herself drew, retrospectively, when she described what she and the family had failed to reckon with: not that the lion looked dangerous, but that the lion was dangerous while looking comfortable, and that the comfort of the appearance had been allowed to stand in for the reality of the nature. The photographs are evidence of the appearance. The retrospective assessment — “stupid beyond belief” — is evidence of the reckoning with the gap between the appearance and the nature.
Animal trainers and wildlife biologists who discuss large cats in captivity tend to make a similar distinction with consistent emphasis: that the apparent calm of a habituated large cat in a familiar environment is a behavioral state that can change, for reasons that are not always predictable, and that the change can be extremely fast and extremely dangerous. Hedren’s description of the speed — “these animals are so fast, and if they decide to go after you, nothing but a bullet to the brain will stop them” — reflects the same understanding. The habituated calm is real. It is also not a guarantee about the future or a substitute for structural protection.