By Emily Groseclose
I’ll be the first to admit that when Tiger King was first released, I was transfixed. Everything about the show was so outrageous and unpredictable that I couldn’t tear my eyes away! I mean, I expected a documentary about some weird tiger conservationist guy, and when I tell you that is not what I got, I mean it wholeheartedly.
Although I admittedly dove headfirst into the exciting and intoxicating lives of Joe Exotic, Carol Baskins, and Doc Antle, concerns have arisen among multitudes of viewers, and I have to agree with many of them.
The most prominent concern would have to be the idolization of Joe Exotic. However relatable his campaign speech may be (wherein he states that he is gay and broke as shit), Joe Exotic is not a good person. In the very last, newly released episode, every person interviewed said that Joe Exotic deserved his sentence and that he was an awful person. It’s not hard to see.
It was recently revealed that Joe Exotic needlessly killed multiple tigers to make room in his cages. He also killed a horse that didn’t belong to him after he agreed to look after it, claiming that he doesn’t look after animals for people. I honestly expected the show to be about tiger conservation, and while the subject was touched on briefly, it was never truly addressed. Joe was not kind to his animals, and was even afraid of them, further proving the point of the animal rights activists that Joe fought with for so long.
The one person that I believe to be the most interesting and kind-hearted was Saff, who was repeatedly misgendered throughout the docuseries. Saff uses he/him pronouns, but the show used she/her pronouns and used the name “Kelci” instead. Like most of the staff (but probably moreso), Saff was dedicated to the tigers and keeping them alive and healthy.
Despite this and the fact that he had his arm bit off by a tiger, Saff was the only person in the final episode to point out the good side of Joe. We saw a snippet of it in an episode of the docuseries wherein Joe makes and provides Thanksgiving dinner for people in his community and does so annually.
To wrap up, I would like to jokingly say that Carol Baskin fed her husband to the tigers, but in context… Did he kind of deserve it? A creepy 40-year-old married man pulls up to a 19-year-old Carol walking the streets alone and pressures her to get into his car by telling her she can hold a gun. He has money. He can provide for her in her time of need. I mean, can you blame her?? On the contrary, however, Carol did some shady things as well, like keeping her dead husband’s fortune from his family. So, in sum, Carol Baskin killed her husband and fed him to the tigers. The end.
