Tiger King, the bonkers backwoods docuseries about a polygamous, meth-addicted tiger breeder who went to jail in a murder-for-hire plot, has become a worldwide pop-cultural phenomenon. It’s the No. 1 show on Netflix, has spawned an endless array of memes, and everyone from hip-hop icon RZA to endangered-animal murderer Donald Trump Jr.—whose big takeaway was how cheap it can be to purchase a tiger—has weighed in.
One person who isn’t so enamored with the show is John Goodrich—the chief scientist for Panthera, one of the world’s leading wild cat conservation organizations, and the world’s foremost tiger biologist. “It’s one of the most appalling shows I’ve ever seen,” he says.
Goodrich was disappointed in how the series “wasn’t really that much about the cats and was about the bizarre characters involved in the big-cat industry in the U.S. If it were more focused on the tigers, Tiger King wouldn’t have left out that Joe Exotic wasn’t just convicted of murder-for-hire but nine violations of the Endangered Species Act. Federal agents found bones belonging to five tigers in the back of Joe Exotic’s zoo—tigers that he shot to death and buried there. “In 20 years, I’ve had 50-plus tigers buried in that back pasture, and nobody gives a damn,” he confessed during his trial.
In addition to the killings, Joe Exotic was found to have committed eight violations of the Lacey Act for selling tiger cubs across state lines. Then there’s Mario Tabraue, a former drug trafficker and the supposed inspiration for Scarface’s Tony Montana, who alleges in Tiger King that he’d purchased tigers from another breeder and tiger zoo overlord, Doc Antle. “If you’re breeding, you’re making the problem worse,” says Dr. Goodrich, who believes that many of these animals are being sold for parts. “What happens to all these tigers after they’re past their four-month petting age? They’re breeding thousands of tigers each year, and you can make a lot of money selling tiger carcasses. The black-market trade of tiger parts is driving the poaching, which is driving the extinction of wild tigers.”
Which brings us to the matter of Carole Baskin. She is the proud owner of Big Cat Rescue, an animal sanctuary in Tampa, Florida, that bills itself as “the largest accredited sanctuary in the country dedicated entirely to abused and abandoned big cats.”
Despite being the victim in a murder-for-hire plot, Baskin has oddly emerged as the villain of Tiger King, with fans of the show parroting Joe Exotic’s obsessive claim that she killed her multimillionaire husband, Don Lewis, who mysteriously disappeared, as well as his firm belief that Baskin is a hypocrite, since she charges high fees to tour Big Cat Rescue, has a staff of unpaid interns running the park, and pulls in millions in profits. While Baskin certainly isn’t as bad as Joe Exotic or Doc Antle on the big-cat front—she’s not breeding and/or selling tigers, after all—her sanctuary isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“One of the problems with ‘legitimate’ sanctuaries is that some of them might be making profits off of their sanctuaries, and it gives the public the impression that they’re making some great contribution to cat conservation and protecting cats by giving money to these sanctuaries,” says Goodrich. “It is not a contribution to saving big cats. I’ve never been to one but these sanctuaries in the U.S. run the gamut from people who are living hand to mouth and putting everything they make back into taking care of the cats, to ones where people are making a lot of money under the guise of a big cat rescue sanctuary.”
Big Cat Rescue’s 2018 tax return revealed that the company raked in over $1.2 million in profits.
The real way to help tigers, according to Goodrich, is to help forests, because they are “the lungs of our planet,” but mostly to support organizations that aim to “protect wild cats in their natural habitats” and “legislation against wildlife trade.”
Dr. John Goodrich collaring a tiger in Russia
A. RybinYou see, there were approximately 100,000 tigers roaming the land a century ago; now, that number is down to just 3,900. Panthera and Goodrich has set a goal of increasing the wild tiger population by 50 percent over the next ten years
“No captive-born tiger has ever been released back into the wild. That’s not what wild tiger conservation is about. It’s about protecting and growing the populations that exist in the wild,” he says. “These [sanctuary] organizations don’t really contribute to that, and the amount of money they give to conservation could qualify as greenwashing. They’re throwing a little money to better their name.”
And he has a message for viewers of Tiger King: “What they saw, they learned nothing about tiger conservation,” argues Goodrich. “I think the only place for tigers in captivity are in accredited zoos.”
