Tiger King: Captive Breeding, Conservation Lies and Corruption
Why Tiger King missed a valuable opportunity to highlight a much wider, global conservation problem.
I began watching Netflix’s latest hit series “Tiger King” believing it to be a conservation miniseries shedding light on the true scale of the exotic pet trade in America. Though, as the full title does warn, the show is in fact a story of “Murder, Mayhem and Madness”. Despite the driving narrative of a toxic feud between Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, with a side of animal abuse and exploitation for financial gain thrown in for good measure, the series does open the public up to a controversial and complex debate that has long since been argued in the world of conservation: is captive breeding a ‘good’ thing?
“There are more tigers in captivity in America than there are tigers left in the wild”
As much as most of us would love to see wild animals roam freely without any form of human intervention, the reality of the overpopulated world we have now created means that captive breeding, if done correctly, does have a role to play in successful conservation practise — in particular in the conservation of critically endangered species. But before I dive into what these benefits are, I would first like to address some major points in the series that either misled viewers or were not fully explained.
1. It is apparent that many of the tiger owners interviewed in the series believed the work they do and the interactive experiences they offer successfully educate and engage the general public with big cat conservation. David Attenborough once said “no one will protect what they don’t care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced”. While there is a certain degree of truth in that we must engage people more with conservation, it is not always the case that conservation awareness converts into conservation action, and that is the main flaw in the argument made by many tiger zoo owners. Places like the G.W. Zoo are private zoos, and much of the money made from visitor admission goes directly into the pockets of owners or into the daily maintenance of the zoo, this money carries little to no conservation value. In short, a group of teenagers finding a baby tiger ‘cute’ is not going to help secure natural protected areas for wild tiger populations, is it? The series paints Big Cat Rescue (BCR) as an equally deceptive money-making scheme, yet BCR is a non-profit, meaning all revenue is publicly published and directed towards accredited conservation organisations around the world.
2. A shocking interview in the show that really gave insight into the thought process behind many large-scale tiger breeders described captive breeding as the obvious solution to the worldwide decline in wild tiger populations. This, of course, is not that simple. Not only are hand-reared tigers unable to be returned to the wild due to their inability to catch prey, tiger breeding across the US has been done with no regard for genetic viability. Much of the population is inbred or hybridised, with mixed or unknown lineages, meaning these tigers can never be part of real captive-breeding efforts alongside accredited organisations that seek to preserve wild populations and subspecies.
3. Carole Baskin is labelled a ‘hypocrite’ as a result of her, herself, being guilty of cub petting in the past. This of course is true, but why must this undermine the valuable work of what is now an accredited charity that donates large sums of money towards genuine big cat conservation? This all stems from the idea of ‘environmental perfectionism’, a problem which I believe often hinders conservation efforts and attempts to engage with the wider public. We are all guilty of unknowingly partaking in activities that have had a negative impact of the environment and wildlife around us at some point in our lives, but this is often unintentional and a result of a lack of understanding. Surely it is far better we acknowledge our past mistakes, learn from them, change our practices and help to educate others not to make the same errors, rather than constantly criticise past mistakes which may have had good intentions?
4. One of the saddest moments for me was watching newly born tiger cubs screaming in a baby’s crib, which seemed to be irritating their owner Joe Exotic. Tiger cubs in the wild remain under their mother’s care for up to the first 2 years of their life. Tiger breeding facilities like those seen in Tiger King take cubs from their mother immediately after birth to be petted by paying visitors, a process which is highly stressful for both mother and cub. Moreover, by taking the cubs away soon after birth the mother is brought back into oestrus much more quickly to maximise the number of cubs she has. This intensity of breeding can have severe impacts on the health of female tigers, often significantly shortening their life span. They are essentially bred intensively until they become too worn down to continue in order to maximise profits from cub petting.
5. This leads me onto the problem with cub petting itself. Tiger cub petting in the US has zero conservation value, and this highlights a much wider, global problem. Big cat petting is widespread across the world, particularly with tiger cubs in the USA and with lion cubs in South Africa. Cubs are exploited as an attraction for tourists until they eventually grow too big and too dangerous for people. At this stage, their life can go a number of different ways. So often, in the case of lions in particular, they are sold as ‘canned hunts’, where they will be raised with the sole purpose of being shot by a paying hunter. Tiger and lion bones are also frequently, and legally, sold to supply traditional Asian medicine. Otherwise, they are returned to the intensive captive-bred population and the cycle of a life in captivity is continued.
Captive breeding can also be a valuable tool for conservationists, but it is important to acknowledge that not all of these approaches will apply to every species. Here’s a list of how successfully applied captive breeding and zoos can benefit the conservation of wild animal populations:
Species recovery– captive breeding has famously saved several species from extinction. Notable examples include the Mauritius kestrel (Falco punctatus), California condor (Gymnogyps californianus)and Black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes). This can be done through headstarting and responsible breeding and reintroduction.
Research — advancing understanding of animal husbandry, breeding behaviour and disease response to better inform wild population management practices.
Training– training conservation specialists to build a greater capacity for action and transfer valuable skills into the world of conservation.
Education — educate the wider public on challenges in conservation and to biodiversity and advise how people can get involved and help.
Fundraising — raising money for in situ conservation research and management practice.
Now make no mistake, I did not exactly relate to Carole Baskin’s holistic view and approach to big cat conservation and I find the way she personally engages people with conservation to be rather strange and inaccessible to many people not already engaged with conservation. Engaging the wider public with conservation goals is a challenge not to be underestimated however, and though there is room for improvement in her approach, the way her work was portrayed as equally as exploitive of animals for financial gain by her opposers was just fundamentally wrong, and quite frankly fuelled in part by misogyny — but that’s a whole different side to the series altogether. The uncontrolled and mass-scale breeding of exotic pets across the US, however, is an indisputably cruel, moneymaking abuse of wildlife operating under the guise of valuable conservation work. The day the ‘Big Cat Public Safety Act’ is finally passed will be a welcome one.
