Netflix’s new docuseries sensation Tiger King is not especially kind to any of its participants—including, many have argued, the big cats whose welfare (or lack thereof) it ostensibly exists to interrogate. Almost everyone who appears on camera is presented as some flavor of eccentric weirdo, with the majority of that attention being placed (understandably) on the excessive and bizarre life of renegade zoo keeper/current prison inmate Joe Exotic. But while Exotic is the main event, the series also points a healthy heaping of suspicion and implied scorn on the object of his attempted murder-for-hire scheme, Florida sanctuary operator Carole Baskin. The show spends a whole episode on rumors—propagated by Exotic, a man who hated her so much he tried to hire people to kill her—that Baskin murdered her second husband and then fed him to her tigers. It also layers on multiple suggestions that her Big Cat Rescue is no better than the private zoos she crusades against, showing what appears to be large cats in cramped conditions in the 67-acre facility.
