Anna Daniels
While Tiger King doesn’t necessarily feature any perfect heroes or villains, animal rights activist Carole Baskin, the woman Joe Exotic tried to hire a hitman to kill, definitely comes off as more sympathetic as compared to her big cat-obsessed foil. Baskin is the star female character in a lurid story populated almost entirely by men; she owns Big Cat Rescue based out of Citrus Park, Florida, and made taking down Exotic’s G.W. Zoo into a kind of personal crusade.
Certainly sounds like heroic work, but Goode said he has serious reservations about Baskin and her rescue. “I think there’s a lot of hypocrisy when it comes to Carole, and a lot of greenwashing,” he told EW. “I have mixed feelings about supporting places that [claim to] rescue big cats because I’m not sure ultimately, they’re providing such a service. I hate to say this, but the Humane Society rescues dogs or the ASPCA, and they humanely euthanize a lot of dogs and people sometimes take offense with that. But oftentimes that’s the most humane thing to do, just humanely euthanize an animal rather than keeping them in a cage for the duration of its life. Carole keeps them in cages for the duration of their lives, and I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do.”
Chaiklin, for her part, came away from the project with a more sympathetic view of Baskin. “I agree with Eric,” she said. “But I do think at least she is raising awareness around this issue.”
Could a second season dive deeper into the costs and benefits of big cat rescue shelters like Baskin’s versus programs in the wild? At this point, it’s all speculation. We’ll just have to wait and see if Netflix orders another round of Tiger King — but given the series’ success, it seems pretty likely.
Written by: Looper
