Tiger King ... holy eff

I have wondered what happens to the big cats the magicians use. There were a couple of guys in Vegas who had big cats in their acts. They would show a video of their compound outside of town. Those magicians and their acts are gone. Where are the animals??

 

Baskin makes a point to make a plaque for each old cat that dies on her property. You figure out why later in the series.

 

Carole Baskin is a horrible person.

The photo with her having her current husband on a leash was on point.

She’s lied so many times about killing her first husband that she thinks she didn’t do it.

Joe is a broken guy who needs about 2,000 hours of therapy. He is a scumbag. But he has an underdog (wrong word?) feel to him.

 

See, that's another example of the series portraying the Baskins as freaks for maximum effect. The image was part of a series of whimsical beach wedding photos in which they were acting goofy. But even if it wasn't, so what? Yes, they're weird, they're cat people, they had a cat-themed wedding. How is that remotely comparable to any other of the trainwrecks in this series?

I don't know whether she killed her husband, but if you care to look further, there are sources out there that give a much more complete picture of the case than what is shown in the series. The police spent thousands of man hours on the case, it was the subject of tabloid fodder and *immense* local media coverage at the time. So, yes, if she seems accustomed to professing her innocence it's because she's been doing it for a long time, long before Tiger King.

 

After one of the tigers tried to eat the magicians, it's not a huge leap of the imagination to guess what happened...

 

Yeah, that was Roy (of Siegfried and Roy) in 2003. There were a couple of others in Vegas in the past 10 years. All gone now. Dirk Arthur and Rick Thomas.

 

Woke up at 2:30 in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I started watching. Up to the last episode before I had to start doing work, but this is an ugly world with bad people.

 

Stupid question but what happens to all of the tigers once they are no longer little cubs? It seemed like the money was all in the interaction with the baby cubs, which has a very small window. Once they age out, are they killed as it doesn’t seem economically feasible to care for them?

 

Well, uh, that's part of what Joe is accused of doing - shooting the adult tigers.

 

Obviously, but that is only 5 tigers. Given the need to have a steady supply of baby tigers, one would think that the body count would be huge.

 

This story, written a year ago, includes details not covered in the Series.
Joe Exotic: A Dark Journey Into the World of a Man Gone Wild