On a whim, I began watching Netflix’s new documentary series, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness, which apparently set out to be the Blackfish of the private big cat zoo world but quickly became something a bit more eccentric and “true crime’-ish. Just like the characters it follows: Joe Exotic (the Tiger King himself), Doc Antle, and “big cat rescue” lady, Carole Baskin. Part of the shift in tone from animal rights documentary to a true crime dive into the dark hole of the human soul appears to be the fact that Joe Exotic, a longtime enemy of Carole Baskin, was arrested and convicted last year for attempting a murder-by-hire on Baskin. Or maybe that was just the icing on the cake the directors realized they had baked after filming. I don’t know.
I’m not really here to talk about that, though. Rather, I want to talk about my own perspective on this cast of characters and the many others like them in the exotic pet world. As many of you know, I am also an exotic pet owner and come from a family of them. By comparison to the cast of characters in Tiger King, however, we’re fairly innocuous varieties. I keep small snakes and lizards (three corn snakes, a bull snake, a spotted python, a Peruvian and a Colombian rainbow boa, and (now) 3 leopard geckos) while my mom and her delightful wife Kathy run a bird rescue — which results in their house being a haven for parrots. Our perspectives are fairly close: we both think that most bird species should not be kept as pets, especially certain breeds of parrots, but we also agree that many exotics can, with proper care, be wonderful additions in a family. In my case, I just really like reptiles, but I draw a pretty firm line over what I consider acceptable as a reptile keeper.
If you’ve watched the documentary, you might understand why I strongly disagree with the characters shown to us (even Carole Baskin, though for entirely different reasons). While I clearly don’t have a problem with keeping exotic animals as pets in principle, you can tell from the types of exotic pets I keep that I take huge issue with the types of folks found in this documentary. I do not keep venomous snakes, large snakes easily capable of killing a grown man, or other exotics that are not suited in any way to captivity. My largest snake is around 5 feet in length. The most complicated snakes I keep require high humidity. Barring having a massive stroke while holding one of my snakes and that snake deciding for some reason to strangle me to death while I’m out cold, there’s basically no risk to me outside of a bacterial infection from a bite — and, boy, that’s gonna be a hell of a rare way to go. Also: same thing can happen from keeping a cat or dog, so…
With the exception, perhaps, of some species of birds, exotics are, by and large, nowhere close to domesticated. They are wild animals. And wild animals are not your friends (an exception here, again, to some species of birds who are, I’d argue, as close to domesticated as an exotic can get). These big cat guys are, in fact, playing with fire. The documentary shows this. Repeatedly. One of the members of Joe Exotic’s crew lost their arm when a tiger basically tore it off. Multiple members of the crew have been attacked. A child got bit hard by a young tiger while on a tour in Joe’s zoo. I don’t care how good you are at what you do; when you treat big exotics like they are not the dangerous predators that they are, you are risking the day when you or someone else dies from an attack.
Worse, the people who do this stuff have a impact not only on how exotic keepers are perceived by the public in the negative, but also in the way they are perceived in the positive. I don’t doubt that almost all of these big exotic keepers take what they do seriously and caution against people getting into a hobby for kicks in private, but the way they are often portrayed in the media — something they happily feed to draw attention to their zoos and causes — gives a false impression of what it takes to actually keep and care for these animals. And we’re all guilty, too. We watch those guys on late night TV who bring cute baby tigers and stuff to wow us. We ooh and aah because, well, they are pretty damn cute. But almost all of these guys (and it’s usually guys) play up the cute and eccentric and weird for laughs or oohs — an endless frustration for me about late night TV. They rarely force the issue on the dangers these animals post to humans if not treated with kid gloves. That they’re not toys or cutesy pets. Even when we get that narrative, it’s still presented as “haha, funny funny, look at the TV host get dramatically uncomfortable.”
Don’t get me wrong. Not all exotic keepers are like this. Some do keep big exotics — big cats or snakes, etc. — solely for education. They work with teams to take care of those animals, and they generally take great care when handling or dealing with them (though not as much care as I would like). But it bothers me to no end that someone can show up at a zoo with a giant snake, call it Fluffy, put it around a kid’s neck, and then play it off like that snake, even on its best day, wouldn’t kill. The phrase “puppy dog tame” comes up a lot in these circles. And, well, no. Nobody worries that a puppy on a bad day might strangle you to death and leave your rotting corpse in the hallway.
To add to this, these antics often convince other folks that buying one of these is a great idea. And then it grows. And becomes dangerous enough that you probably shouldn’t handle it alone. And then it kills someone or that person lets it go in the wild or abuses it and leaves it at some rescue that isn’t equipped to handle a 15+-foot snake. Reticulated and Burmese pythons are absolutely gorgeous animals, but they are not, in my opinion, for anyone other than the most advanced of keepers. And don’t get me started on the venomous guys who free handle rattlesnakes.
In a lot of ways, I think many exotic keepers damage their own causes. The fact is that the pet trade may be necessary to preserve some species which will go extinct in the wild. We need people with experience to keep snakes for education so people stop killing them in the wild just because they’re scared. We need big cat guys who can teach us why these animals are amazing and beautiful and dangerous. But those eccentric weirdos in the lot? They get a lot of the attention. And they paint a very dark picture of the rest of us.
All that said, I do think Tiger King is a fascinating documentary series. It’s anxiety-inducing for someone like me who has opinions, but it also raises some really interesting questions about the cult of personality, exploitation of people and animals, the ethical quandaries some keepers raise, etc. If this is a topic that interests you, give it a view!
Lastly, here’s a perty snek:
