The tigers of Tiger King

Netflix’s Tiger King is truly astounding TV. After I had watched it, a mate of mine started it and was going to quit after the first episode. He asked me if he should carry on and only thing I could say is that, two episodes in, I assumed that it might be a three episode series, maybe four. It was already so crazy that surely it couldn’t keep going much longer. Then I saw that it was seven episodes. Seven. I kept waiting for a peak of how ridiculous it was and more and more insane things just kept happening. It was madness, and absolutely riveting.

With the larger than life characters, polygamy, a possible cult, limbs being torn off, strip-club owners, presidential runs and alleged assassination attempts, it’s really easy to forget the big cats that are the foundation of the whole business. Lions, ocelots, leopards and other cats make appearances but the eponymous tigers are the stars. Except for the last couple of minutes of the final episode, there is no real mention of wild tigers. We see them in cages, breeding with lions and petted by tourists. At the risk of nakedly taking advantage of it being in the consciousness of society, I’m going to talk a bit about these amazing creatures.

Tigers in 2020

One of things they did mention in the show was that there is potentially double the number of tigers in the US than there are in their native range. There are thought to be around 3,000 tigers in the wild in less than 6% of their historical range. Even this tiny portion of their range is spread across South East Asia and west into Myanmar, Bangladesh, and India, and north into the Nepalese Himalayas. The Siberian subspecies exists separately in a small portion of the Russian Far East, one of the 6 remaining subspecies. They are threatened by poaching, targeted because their body parts are used in traditional medicine. Tigers have massive ranges and can travel huge distances. This means that their populations are particularly sensitive to habitat loss, and their ranging brings them into conflict with burgeoning human populations.

It doesn’t look good for tigers to be honest unless there are serious efforts to protect, restore and connect their habitats as well as tackle the threat of poaching. The debates over how to conserve these animals are long and complex. One of the areas where the argument is particularly fierce is over captivity, and its value to the conservation of this species.

Tigers in captivity - conservation and animal rights

What extent do the wildlife attractions in Tiger King, including Carole Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue, contribute to conservation? The answer, which I’m sure will not be a surprise, is probably very little.

Things get muddied by the confusion between conservation and animal rights. Whilst the two often align, they are not the same things. A recent controversy was sparked by George Monbiot shooting a deer in Scotland when shooting his Apocalypse Cow documentary. Ecological theory says that the lack of predators has led to inflated deer populations in Scotland, and they are suppressing other diversity by their grazing. Hardline animal rights activists say that there is never an excuse for a human to kill any animals, so there is no justification for lethal population reductions. There are even those people who suggest killing predators to prevent the suffering they inflict on prey. In trying to state the objective of conservation, I am going to make a massive generalisation, and will likely make a some people very angry. But generally the aim is to prevent extinctions of species and allow them to exist in functioning ecosystems, interacting with other species. The methods of trying to achieve this can include killing things.

Animal welfare is a key consideration for zoos, and for conservation. But it is not the be all and end all, sometimes individual welfare is sacrificed. Big Cat Rescue is probably preventing suffering on an individual basis, allowing these animals to live out their days without perpetuating the huge captive populations of these cats in America. But is it making significant contributions to the conservation of big cats?

Zoos and conservation

There are four main ways that zoos can contribute to conservation:

1. Money. They are hugely popular and can pass on some of their income to conservation projects in the wild.

2. Expertise. They can use the expertise to help the people who protect nature in the wild.

3. Education. They can use their captive audience of visitors to tell them about the natural world and the threats it faces.

4. Insurance. Captive populations will be there if their counterparts in the wild go extinct. This insurance means that the species is not gone for ever, even if there are no individuals left in the wild.

Which of these four did Joe Exotic, or any of the other colourful characters in the series, do? My guess is very little of any.

Keeping big cats is expensive, and I’m not sure that if a zoo is getting in free expired meat from Walmart and not paying its staff then it is donating anything. I cannot find any reference of Big Cat Rescue donating either, and interestingly on their website they seem to state that donation to conservation in the wild is just a business move for zoo’s to justify their existence, ‘Some zoos make relatively small donations to work in the wild, just so they can say they support it, but if you look at the amount of money generated by zoos and the pittance that goes to protecting wild animals in the wild, their motivations become apparent ‘. This may be the case for some places, but other zoos do contribute significant amounts. As for the second, the staff are not going out to tiger range countries to help, and I’m not sure they would have anything at all to contribute even if they did.

The final two are a little more tricky. I expect that amongst the pettings, the shows and the exhibits, there is some talk of the danger of extinction and what tigers are threatened by. But what does this achieve, really, unless the visitors go home and change their behaviour and use fewer resources, donate to charities, live more sustainably? The bigger message at these places, one that overshadows the rhetoric, is that tigers are playthings. There to be tamed, petted, enjoyed and then sold on or killed. This surely undermines any conservation messages. Whilst this may not be the message at Big Cat Rescue, their sole aim seems to be ending big cat captivity and their website makes them seem actively hostile to zoos contributing to wild conservation. I obviously haven’t been for an ‘educational tour’ but it would seem that their education focuses on the rights of captive cats, not on conservation.

For the final impact, when it comes to pure numbers there is no arguing with the American keeping of tigers. If it was just about breeding and preventing global extinction, then having double the number of tigers in American captivity than in the wild is an astonishing achievement. If the last 3,000 wild tigers die over the next 20 years, there will surely still be American tigers and the species will not be extinct. Job done? Not really. I don’t think anyone would consider this a success. For many, having animals in captivity is a pale shadow of having them within intact ecosystems, free to do as tigers have done for thousands of years. But what of the chance of reintroductions? A long-shot I’m afraid. The boredom, lack of contact between mothers and cubs, the interactions with other species that they would never meet in the wild (lions, humans, bears) and countless other things mean that these animals will have lost the behavioural patterns that would allow them survive in the wild. Without knowing their genetics there is no knowing what part of the vast range of tigers, if any, they would be suited to. Well organised and funded zoos that are focused on conservation employ people full time to keep good records of the genetics and breeding of their collections. God knows where these American tigers came from and who has bred with who.

Watch Tiger King and revel in the absurdity of the whole thing. But bear in mind that this foul industry has these wonderful animals at its heart. Remember their wild counterparts. I am not denigrating the work that animal sanctuaries do (the good ones at least) for animal welfare. But when it comes to conserving wild tigers, no one you see on screen is doing very much. They are victims who cannot speak out on their own behalf and may soon be gone for good.

Aspire to stop flying

Global climate breakdown and ecological crisis are forcing us to re-think many things. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that turning down a straw in our cocktails, recycling our milk bottles or turning the tap off while we brush our teeth is not quite going to cut it when it comes to avoiding sheer disaster. Instead there are going to have to be wholesale changes to how we organise our society and how we live our lives. It is a difficult pill to swallow that one of these changes has to be the amount of travelling we can do.

Everyone knows that air travel is ridiculously carbon intensive and, along with switching to plant-based diets and moving to a renewable energy supplier, not taking flights is one of the easiest things we can do to decrease our personal impact on the environment. The aspirational nature of travel, and how it has been sold as such a virtuous activity, make it appealing to the young and the green. Get out and see the world, expand your mind and broaden your horizons. Such platitudes are commonplace, and massively appeal to people of an environmental persuasion. In an age of rampant consumerism, spending money on experiences is seen as an antidote to buying unnecessary things. Take only pictures, leave only footsteps is a solid mantra for not damaging the place you visit. But it doesn’t take into account the journey you took to get there. The airports, security checks and immigration desks don’t feature in the Instagram posts. You can flaunt your experiences, your sensitivity to other cultures and your environmental credentials on social media for the world to see, carefully edited to look idyllic. This feeds the cycle of aspiration and the production of greenhouse gases that goes along with it. This is why giving up flying and international travel is so hard, even for people who are otherwise massively invested in the environmental movement.

It is difficult to tell people that they have to reduce their quality of life and stop doing something that is now so ubiquitous as to be considered a right, not an indulgence. The falling price of an activity that many people enjoy, taking it out of the hands of a few and making it widely available, is certainly a good thing. The issue is not with the wider availability of air travel, it would be wrong to demonise people for taking advantage of the opportunity for cultural enrichment, or even just for the chance of some sun. The easiest way to reduce the amount of people flying would be to tax the activity more heavily. Making air travel prohibitively expensive would massively decrease its net impact of the environment yes, but regressing to a system where wealth buys you access is surely not the right way. The problem is not with the increasing availability of the activity, but with the activity itself. A tax is not the correct way forwards in my view, although I will not pretend to have the answer. A start would be to stop subsidising domestic air travel. Any policy to reduce reliance on air travel has to go hand in hand with an improvement in other public transport and nationalising the railways, which are a joke in the north of England, is surely the low-hanging fruit.

Whilst it is possible to replace domestic air travel with much less carbon-intensive alternatives, this is not the case with international air travel. Stopping this will be much more difficult, as it needs a fundamental change of mindset, and a recasting of desires and aspirations within our society. In the same way that people get defensive when it is suggested that changing their diet might be a good idea for the environment, they do the same when it is suggested that the planet cannot afford their annual holiday, even if they can. But it is not progress to blindly continue with an activity that contributes to environmental breakdown, even if we have been given the hard sell that it is.