The Shambala Preserve continues to operate in Acton, California. The Roar Foundation continues to fundraise for the animals’ care. The Big Cat Public Safety Act continues to prohibit the creation of new private big cat ownership arrangements of the kind that the 1971 LIFE photographs documented. Michael Rougier’s photographs continue to circulate, reprinted in articles about unusual celebrity pets and celebrity history and the astonishing archive of twentieth-century American life that LIFE magazine assembled across its decades of publication.
The granddaughter, Dakota Johnson, who was born in 1989 — eighteen years after the photographs were taken — has spoken about her grandmother with warmth and about the preserve with specific affection. She has described going to Shambala and working with the animals there, maintaining a family relationship to the animals that now spans three generations. The specific biographical detail of a granddaughter who has grown up knowing that her grandmother and mother were both injured by large cats during a film production, and who nonetheless maintains a relationship with the sanctuary that houses those animals’ successors, is the kind of detail that the official summary of the story tends to lose.
The story is not simple. It is not a story about a woman who made a terrible mistake and then corrected it; the correction is ongoing and has never been complete, because the animals continue to exist and continue to require care. It is not a story about a woman who understood risks that others did not and who was vindicated by events; the people around her were injured, and she was injured, and the film’s commercial failure was catastrophic. It is not a story about the innocence of wild animals and the corruption of human ambition; the animals were what they were, and the humans were what they were, and the encounter between them produced what the record documents.