Yeah. I've seen this documentary. Back in the Sixties and Seventies it was actually quite a common thing in Britain for people to keep big cats, like lions and tigers, as pets because in those days it was legal. It was actually not unusual to walk down a street in London and see a tiger or other big cat being walked on a lead like a dog.
When I was a kid back in the late Eighties I used to have a book - Born Free - about Elsa the Lioness.
Elsa the lioness (c. January 1956 to January 24, 1961) was raised by British game warden George Adamson and his Austrian wife Joy Adamson in Kenya (which was then still part of the British Empire). Elsa and her two sisters, "Big One" and "Lustica", first came under the care of the Adamsons when only a few weeks old. They had become orphaned when George was reluctantly forced to kill their mother during one of his safaris. (He was hunting for a male maneater, but when a female charged him, he fired in self defence. After the lioness was dead, it was apparent that she was defending her cubs.) Her two sisters were eventually sent to the Rotterdam Zoo in the Netherlands, while Elsa herself remained with the Adamsons until she was released into the wild, following the Adamsons' efforts to train her to survive on her own.
Two Decades After Born Free, George Adamson, the Surviving Human Friend of the Lioness Elsa, Thrives in the Wild : People.com
