The domestic arrangement at Sherman Oaks lasted for some period between Neil’s arrival around 1971 and the authorities’ order to remove the animals in 1972. During that period, the arrangement held: Neil did not seriously injure anyone in the family. This is the fact. It is a fact that exists alongside another fact: that the same species of animal, in the same kinds of proximity to humans, repeatedly injured the people involved in the Roar production across five years of filming. The animals in the production were different individual animals from Neil, with different histories and different temperaments and different states at different moments. But they were lions, and they were tigers, and they were leopards, and the injuries that accumulated reflect what happens when the structural protection that keeps humans safe from large predators is reduced to habituated familiarity and the hope that this familiarity will hold.
## The Vietnamese Nail Salon Story
Among the less-discussed aspects of Tippi Hedren’s biography is an episode that has nothing to do with big cats but that has had, if the accounts are accurate, a more widespread and durable impact on American economic life than anything connected to the Roar project or the Shambala Preserve.
In 1975, Hedren was working with Food for the Hungry, an international relief and development organization, in connection with the large influx of Vietnamese refugees who had arrived in the United States in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon. She visited a refugee camp — the account most commonly cited places this at Hope Village in Sacramento, California — where she met with Vietnamese women who were trying to establish economic footing in their new country.