Tiger King’s Critics: Tigers Are Not Objects To Be Used for Monetary Gain

“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.”

— Sharon Guynup, National Geographic webcast, April 3

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

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On Assignment: A Conversation with Dereck and Beverly Joubert

“Anybody who comes out into nature, whether it’s toward polar bears or elephants or the great apes or anything, and wishes to destroy it, is acting selfishly. They may say they want to do it for reasons they think can justify, like conservation, but really and truly it’s a selfish act. You go out to Africa to shoot an elephant, but not because you love elephants or otherwise you wouldn’t shoot them. You go out so that you can acquire it, so you can have it on the wall — your wall — rather than leave it there for other people, hundreds of other people, to see.”

— Dereck Joubert

Dereck Joubert, talking on the phone from New York’s Lincoln Center alongside his filmmaker wife Beverly Joubert, says the traffic in New York is brutal. HIs word.

”It’s the reason we’re late,” he says simply, and it’s not hard to imagine the traffic being a shock to the system after years living in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, filming, photographing and studying the vast ecosystem’s natural rhythms.

The Jouberts are talking to me for my day job: Their three-part, four-years-in-the-making nature film Okavango: River of Dreams is about to make its North American television debut, Wednesday on PBS’s Nature showcase, and while they don’t need the publicity exactly, it can’t hurt. (An account our conversation specific to the film can be found  at TVWorthWatching.com, linked here: http://www.tvworthwatching.com/post/Life-and-Death-in-the-Long-Grass-PBS-Nature-Takes-Viewers-Into-the-Heart-of-the-African-Wilderness-in-Epic-Three-Part-Miniseries.aspx

They’re running late, owing to the kind of traffic that’s  impossible to imagine from a wilderness area some 15,000 kms² (5,800 sq miles), but once they start talking about their life’s passion, it’s hard to let go. They have a meeting to get to, with executives of PBS’s New York affiliate WNET — part of the international consortium that financed River of Dreams — but more than 30 minutes later, Dereck and Beverly Joubert are still talking. The meeting will just have to wait.

The Okavango, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, faces many of the same issues — climate change, habitat loss, human encroachment — the rest of the natural world faces.

Lately, though, the Okavango has had to deal with a whole new challenge.

The government of Botswana has lifted a five-year ban on elephant hunting, owing to growing conflict between humans and the animals, which sometimes destroy crops, and the Jouberts are agitated and annoyed.

Dereck Joubert has actively campaigned against hunting at international symposiums chaired by big players CITES, IUCN, SADC and the UN, while Beverly Joubert has made numerous documentary programs about the subject. The pair are Explorers-in-Residence at National Geographic, and have devoted most of their working lives to studying and getting to know elephants in their natural habitat. Botswana is home to some 130,000 elephants — the world’s largest population — of an animal increasingly under threat around the world.

Dereck Joubert doesn’t pull any punches in his disdain for anyone who’d want to shoot an elephant for the trophy wall, and he’s unafraid to say so out loud. He’s long past the point of social niceties and diplomacy on the subject, even though, around the world, environmental activists are increasingly harassed, threatened and even murdered for speaking out, whether it’s against misuse of power or just old-fashioned greed.

Trophy hunting is just not on, as far as the Jouberts are concerned, regardless of any arguments against.

Joubert has heard the economic argument so often that it’s now like a red flag to a bull, as far as he’s concerned.

“The economics of it all don’t make any sense. People say, ‘Well, the money that I spend, that I give to go and act selfishly, protects the elephants from a broader, relatively intangible threat.’ 

©Beverly Joubert

That is not the motivation. The motivation is that you’re going out there to kill it for yourself. Nobody’s going out there to kill it because they hate killing and they want to do something for conservation. The core of this is a selfish act. And in my opinion, that’s morally bankrupt.”

Beverly Joubert — still recovering from serious injuries she sustained while filming buffalos in the middle of the night,  ironically enough — is equally blunt in her own assessment.

“I really do believe we should all be living in harmony with nature,” she says simply. “Too often I think people forget that we’re just another species on the planet. I suspect that those who go out to kill are trying to be that superior ape. Well, we can be the superior ape. We have the intelligence. But we can live side-by-side with them, and respect them, without having to kill them. That’s what intelligence is.”

Beverly Joubert is worried what will happen now that the hunting ban has been lifted. The new rules come into effect in the new year.

“When the ban was originally enacted we had areas where life came back in a glorious way. We felt that this was what a paradise on earth should be like. And now it’s going to go through another change, and that’s concerning. The change will be man-made, and that’s something we need to be watching. The Okavango is, in almost every way, a wonderful base-line study area for nature. We’re going to be able to see if there is extreme damage.”

The larger picture — climate change — is creating its own problems, because everything is tied to habitat loss.

“We had a screening of the film last night, and

those questions came up from the audience as well.

“They were all wondering how the climate crisis is going to affect Africa. Well, it’s happening. It’s definitely there. We’ve seen it in the violent storms around the globe, and it’s very evident in Botswana. Temperatures are rising every year. Every year, we get the next record high. And now we’re in a drought again, in many parts of Africa.

“There are a lot or profound changes going on, and obviously the environment is one of them. Okavango is really one of the last pristine places left on the planet. We have seen it in a state of flux, through man, over the last 30 years. Areas of the Okavango that used to be hunted lost a huge population of wildlife, and that was very evident and really concerning. That’s why the former president stopped all hunting.”

The Jouberts’ stay in New York has coincided with a series of climate conferences and protests, from the UN to Wall Street. In Botswana, the Jouberts established the Great Plains Foundation which, as part of its remit, works with young people locally to help further the message of conservation. They have never met Greta Thunberg, but it’s only a matter of time before her name comes up in conversation.

“We’re big fans of Greta,” Dereck Joubert says. “What is interesting about that question is that, through Great Plains, we spend quite a bit of time and money and effort working with children around Greta’s age, funnily enough, in Botswana, looking for and nurturing that voice of, not innocence, but that voice of outrage in a child’s way to say that, no, this is not okay. The children have rights, too. They have a right to the future. More and more, we’re starting to hear that in the villages in Botswana.”

©Dereck Joubert, Beverly Joubert

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