What I think about Tiger King

This past week I decided to watch Tiger King because honestly I was just curious what all the hype was about. I remember the day it came on Netflix and it was listed as #1 in America for a couple days. I looked into it but it didn't really seem that interesting to me. It wasn't until my coworker, Seth, instigated me writing this opinion piece that I finally decided to watch it.

After watching the first episode, I'm not gonna lie, I was bored. I didn't watch it for a couple more days. However, after watching the second episode, I was hooked! I finished the rest of the series that day. This show is full of gay pride, polygamy, rednecks, psychopaths, rejects, conspiracy theories, and of course, lots of cats! Now I don't recommend reading any further if you haven't watched the show yet because there are SPOILERS!

I'm going to start off by saying that I am team Joe Exotic all the way. In my opinion compared to every cat caretaker that was on the show, he cared about his cats more than any of them. He seemed to have more of a personal connection to each and every one of them. Granted towards the end when he was more focused on presidency, to becoming governor, to using every cent he had to try to win the case against Carole Baskin, he didn't take as much interest in the tigers. Honestly though, the poor man's one husband left him because he got a coworker pregnant, his other husband just shot himself, and now he's using everything he has to try to stay out of prison because a psycho husband-killer is using her dead husbands money to take him down for something that was blown way out of proportion.

Joe Exotic was a man of many talents. He was the previous owner of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park, which is home to all of his tigers. He was an aspiring country music artist, and actually recorded several albums with music videos. He ran as an independent candidate in the 2016 presidential election where he received 962 votes nationwide. After running for president, he demoted to running for governor. He ran for the liberatarion party in the 2018 election for Governor of Oklahoma where he received 664 votes in total, coming in last place for the party. Through his many excursions and changing of careers, his primary focus and passion was for his animals, unlike his co-star, Doc Antle.

Doc Antle seems to be running an occult. Based off the interview with his former employee, Doc seems to be much more interested in sleeping with his employees than taking care of the animals. He made his employees, mostly women, call him 'Bhagavan' which means lord. He also changed all his female workers names and encouraged them to change them legally. He is also a participant in the polygamist lifestyle with his several wives. (I've never seen so many polygamist people in one show before, until Tiger King)

Now we move onto Carole freaking Baskin. She is an animal rights activist and a husband-killer. She's also the owner of Big Cat Rescue located in Florida. Her lifetime rival is the one and only, Joe Exotic. She doesn't care about the many other circuses, zoos, and animal keepers that treat their animals like dirt, she only cares about the gay, polygamist, red-neck, country music artist, gun-loving zookeeper who loves his animals more. She made it her mission to destroy Joe Exotic and his career, which she eventually did. She also killed her late husband (and definitely fed him to her tigers), Don Lewis who just disappeared one day leaving behind $5 million in assets. Carole didn't wait long to dig into that.

In 2019, Joe Exotic was charged with attempted murder-for-hire against Carole Baskin. Now, not to bring up politics...BUT every republican ever says that Donald Trump's "Grab her by the p***y" was just simply 'locker room talk.' So if we're excusing the president from this because it was said in privacy, shouldn't we excuse Joe Exotic for joking around about having Carole Baskin killed? Just gonna put that out there.

Overall, great docuseries Netflix. I definitely give it about four stars.