I'm not sure "is animal fat harmful?" is the right question, anyways. I sort of doubt that there is no dietary context under which it would be harmful. A common criticism of rodent high fat diet studies is that they often include small amounts of sucrose. Okay--but with just the bit of sugar, but without the increased fat, often the rodents do better. I suspect that you could design a diet in such a way that adding lard to it would make it worse. This doesn't mean that high-lard diets are bad for you--it just means that some high-lard diets are bad for you.

I've seen Volek and Phinney take the stance that saturated fat is harmless--within the context of the ketogenic diet. That doesn't mean that there aren't other diets/lifestyles within which saturated fat is equally harmless--but maybe they're wise to be so specific.