Like most Americans, I spent the early days of quarantine watching Tiger King and debating the role of Carole Baskin in her husband’s disappearance and laughing at the antics of Joe Exotic. I think as a documentary, Tiger King was entertaining, but missed the mark on it’s original goal. When I first heard about this show, I expected it to focus on the mistreatment of these animals and the fad of owning and breeding big cats as accessories for the extremely wealthy. I learned in this discussion that the show was inspired by the documentary, Blackfish, which followed this format to expose the mistreatment of whales at SeaWorld. After watching Tiger King, I was disappointed in its execution on conveying this message though. I do think that there were some good educational parts of the show, and it demonstrated a lot of the mistreatment of these animals and the evil side of owning and breeding wild animals in captivity without proper regulations and controls. However, I think this message was largely overshadowed by the sensational drama between Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin. After hearing other people’s impressions of the show in this discussion, and from seeing peoples’ reaction to it on the internet, it seems like the main takeaway from the show surrounded the flamboyancy and controversy of the two opposing cat owners, and not the cats themselves. While I think this makes for a good piece of entertainment, I wish the creators of the show could have used this attention grabbing drama to draw even more attention to the cruelty and animal rights violations demonstrated by these for-profit “zoos.”

This was my first table talk experience. On this one, we discussed Tiger King. I watched Tiger King over quarantine with my family on Netflix. I enjoyed watching the show and was shocked by a lot of the events that unraveled in the show. Once joining the zoom, we started discussing the extensive mistreatment of cubs and tigers. Many of these tigers are sold and then a year later when they become “too big” they then get rid of them. This makes me sick thinking about the neglect that these tigers are experiencing. I understand that many consumers only want to interact with baby tigers, but it’s unethical to extort these animals for profit and personal gain. Tiger king was so sensationalized but we didn’t see too much emphasis on the animals. I have to admit that even I kind of forgot to focus on the animals. I was also caught up in the discussion of Carole Baskin and her deceased husband. Did she do it or not? In this table talk, I learned that this documentary was started with the intention of it being like “Blackfish” for big cats. Blackfish is a documentary on the problems with SeaWorld and why SeaWorld is bad. I definitely feel that Tiger King missed the mark if they intended to finish with the intentions that they started with. I think that the pandemic helped its success. I usually don’t watch documentaries, but when this was released it felt like most of the US was out home and had nothing else to do. Despite the success, people still aren’t concerned with the cats–it’s more about Carole Baskin and how crazy Joe is. The captive breeding of endangered animals is still a problem to me because they are not in their natural environment. Olivia, another Rose scholar, made a good point that it’s bad to just breed for the sake of having tigers. It is better and more ethical to HELP the species than just breeding them in captivity. At the end of the discussion, I was stumped when we were asked if we believed zoos are ethical. I answered no, but I learned that the AZA has things in place to protect animals in zoos. That was a relief to hear! Overall after this session, I understand more about the extensive network of animal abuse, and breeding and selling tigers–more than I understood from just watching the show.