“I hope that people don’t walk away thinking that petting and taking selfies with tigers or other wild animals is a great thing to do. A rule of thumb: If a venue offers hands-on contact — tiger-cub petting or anything else — there is some kind of abuse involved. It’s important to understand the real cost of that tiger selfie for the animals involved.”
Tiger King is addictive, absurd — and unsettling. It has been available on Netflix for little more than two weeks now, but right from the outset it lit up social media forums in a way few pop-culture talking points have done in this Year of the Pandemic, and with so many people sequestered at home during shelter-at-home orders or social distancing when in public, it was probably inevitable that Tiger King would reach a wider audience than it normally would have.
It’s just as inevitable that initial interest would be followed by a backlash, and this time the backlash is severe.
It’s not just animal-rights activists who are incensed over the way the wildly popular pseudo-documentary series downplayed the mistreatment of captive tigers — tiger cubs force-bred for roadside attractions across the southern US, before being put down when they become too big to handle and too expensive to feed, sometimes as young as four months.
Investigative journalism pieces in National Geographic (Dec. 2019) and other credible news sources exposed the seedy underbelly of the multi-million dollar big-cat breeding industry long before Tiger King caused a pop-cultural sensation and made counter-culture stars out of a motley crew of back-country southern hicks with loose morals and a collective “If-it-pays-it-stays” attitude toward the breeding of big cats for petting zoos and, at USD $5,000 a cub, “private collections.”
As TV, Tiger King is a train wreck, and the producers know there’s nothing like a good train wreck to sell an audience on a reality-TV program.
Animal-rights activists are rightly annoyed, though, that the issues confronting the big-cat breeding trade are reduced to a minute-long — if that — caption crawl at the end of a seven-episode, seven-hour TV drama. For example, viewers learn that there are more tigers in captivity across the US today (5,000-10,000) than there are in the wild throughout the entire world (4,000, and that’s probably an optimistic estimate).
True, Tiger King has opened the eyes of many casual viewers into the seedy world of roadside animal attractions than otherwise might have known about it, or cared. That counts for something. It’s a defence Tiger King’s makers have used, and I alluded to it myself, in a review I wrote for the website TVWorthWatching. Activists of all stripes, regardless of cause, often place too much credit on the value of preaching to the converted. They can’t or won’t accept that a cause, no matter how worthy, will alienate the dispassionate observer if it’s accompanied by sanctimonious hectoring from the pulpit.
In that sense, Tiger King was — and is — the perfect show at the perfect time: adrenaline television shot through with bizarre, over-the-top characters who say and do outrageous things, all to entertain an audience anxious to take their minds off the news of day, desperate for some kind of diversion.
It’s hard to imagine, though, that anyone who watches Tiger King all the way through will have a yearning for more. Few viewers will choose to do extra research into what’s really going on, behind the scenes and hidden from view, at tiger parks and petting zoos. And that’s where the truth-telling comes in.
Just this past week, it was revealed that the self-styled “Tiger King” in the series, nicknamed Joe Exotic (his real name, Joseph Allen Schreibvogel, doesn’t have quite the same ring), has been placed in quarantine for exposure to the coronavirus SARS-Cov-2, aka COVID. He’s currently serving a 22-year prison term in Texas for animal abuse charges and for his role in a murder-for-hire scheme. (Don’t ask; all that is revealed in the Netflix program.)
Anyone familiar with Tiger King could be forgiven for thinking this was a twist invented for their inevitable sequel series, just another reveal in a reality-TV series that made a sport out of outrageous revelations.
And they’d be right.
Joe Exotic does not have coronavirus. The truth, it turns out, is more prosaic: An inmate in the same jail where Joe Exotic was being held tested positive for COVID-19, and Joe Exotic was among several prisoners placed in a precautionary 14-day quarantine. As of writing this, Joe Exotic has not tested positive for coronavirus, as initially reported in the Daily Mirror, among other news sources.
We’re living in a world where seeing is no longer believing, and it’s hard to know who to trust, where news sources are concerned. (Useful tip: The fact-checking website Snopes.com does a good job separating fact from fiction in the rumour mill that passes for news these days.)
The issues facing force-bred tiger cubs remain, however. As Sharon Guynup, the investigative journalist who first reported the story for National Geographic, wrote this week in the Washington Post, Tiger King is not a documentary. There’s a lot viewers don’t see. Expert voices are notably absent. “And the big losers are the tigers.”
If there’s any moral to be taken from the whole sorry Tiger King saga, that’s the one that matters most.
©Fanxing Wei-Pixabay