The lion isn’t attacking the girl in this photo. It’s being playful.
In the early 1970s, Hollywood actress Tippi Hedren and her then 14-year-old daughter, Melanie Griffith, hired a fully-grown lion named Neil into their home to make a family movie (titled “Roar”) using twenty-five lions.
She and her family invited a number of young cubs to live at their Californian home and moved to a mountain ranch to begin filming.
It was a painful experience; Tippi had her arm badly scratched by a leopard, Melanie was scratched on her face, and the director of photography survived a particularly dangerous incident.
The original plan was to shoot “Roar” in nine months, but filming the animals eventually took five years. The film was not released until 1981.
The family’s experience with the lions convinced them that such creatures should not be in close contact with humans. They invited lions into their home at a time when the dangers of keeping such animals was not fully understood.
Although the lions in the pictures above appear to be perfectly tame, Tippi warns that there is no such thing, and that their instinct (which they never lose) means they can attack at any moment.
A lion’s paws are powerful enough to break a zebra’s back, something that none of these people were bearing in mind at the time.
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