Whether it’s Orcas or Tigers—Captivity is Cruel

The Netflix docuseries ‘Tiger King’ could have been a change agent. Despite the impetus of the 5-year project — finding a big cat in someone’s white van in the heat of summer — a deliberate choice was made not to focus on the tigers at all. Their story remains untold.

It did not highlight the rampant abuse inherent in wildlife trafficking, including continuous breeding to provide cubs as photo props — who are discarded, whether sold or killed, when they become too large and dangerous to turn a profit. And while viewers briefly saw the squalid conditions the animals at Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park endured — barren cages, rancid food, and untrained staff — it provided no context. Instead, it made a folk hero out of a man convicted of murder for hire, nine Endangered Species Act violations, and seven counts of falsifying wildlife records, yet villains out of rescuers — those who take in the abandoned and provide homes when the novelty of a pet tiger wears off.

Tiger King succeeded in capturing the human drama, neatly cataloguing the outrageous twists and turns worthy of a soap opera, but it relegated the animals to mere “extra” status.

What the series did do, eventually — after the memes and novelty began to fade, was leave a void now filled with questions… because regardless of the initial entertainment, there was an underpinning that viewers inherently knew was cruel. Watching a newborn tiger being ripped from their mother through a chain link fence — then yelled at them for crying and locking them alone in a room — was portrayed as normal, but it shouldn’t be normal.

Keeping wild animals in captivity is dangerous. From individuals to large corporations, the desire to contain animals both great and small, and control them requires an arrogance exclusive to humans. The more dangerous the animal, the larger the spectacle.

We have taken control, not asking if we should — simply declaring that we can. We choose which animals will live and die, which we can keep and eat, which we use in laboratories and which will entertain us.