What the story is, at its most accurate, is the account of a specific set of choices made by a specific family in a specific time, and what those choices cost, and what they built, and what remains. The lion in the photographs is long dead. The photographs are still there. The animals at Shambala are alive. The legislation Hedren advocated is federal law. The granddaughter is an actress. The family story continues, as family stories do, beyond the frame of any single image or any single chapter, carrying forward the evidence of what was there before.
## The Record and Its Limits
Any account of the events documented in this article operates at some distance from what actually happened. The photographs exist and show what they show; the film exists and contains what it contains; the interviews exist and report what the people who gave them said they remembered. Between these documents and the events they document is the full range of distortion that time, memory, editing, publication decisions, and the specific interests of the people who produced the documents introduce.
The LIFE photographs are the work of a professional photographer who was sent to document a specific scene. What he saw and what he chose to photograph and how he framed the images are all decisions that shaped the record. The photographs that were published are the photographs that editors selected from among the photographs taken. The people in the photographs were aware they were being photographed, which means the photographs document the family’s willingness to be seen in this arrangement as much as they document the arrangement itself.