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Joe Exotic and the Tiger Trade | Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller

3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Car horns blaring] [Phone ringing] [Jungle wildlife calls]

OPERATOR (THROUGH PHONE): Prepaid call from.

JOE EXOTIC (THROUGH PHONE): Joe Exotic.

OPERATOR (THROUGH PHONE): An inmate at the Grady County Jail. This call is also subject to being recorded or monitored.

JOE EXOTIC (THROUGH PHONE): Hello? Hi, how are you doing?

MARIANA (VOICEOVER): Mariana here.

JOE EXOTIC (THROUGH PHONE): Hi. Thank you so much for calling me.

MARIANA (VOICEOVER): It all started with an online reality show. Hey, I'm Joe Exotic, the gay, gun-carrying redneck with a mullet.

MARIANA (VOICEOVER): Before Netflix's hit series, "Tiger King," made Joe Exotic famous worldwide.

FILMMAKER: He was like a mythical character living out in the middle of [beep] Oklahoma.

MARIANA (VOICEOVER): But lost in the hype surrounding the series--

MAN: So Joe said, will you go to Florida and what?

HIT-MAN: Kill that [beep] lady.

MARIANA (VOICEOVER): --was a serious discussion about private tiger ownership in America.

JOE EXOTIC (THROUGH PHONE): I've been in the tiger industry for a little over 20 years now. Probably the largest breeder and handler of tigers in the United States.

MARIANA: So give me just a sense of the tiger community, cow petting zoos, and all that.

JOE EXOTIC (THROUGH PHONE): Well, you're getting the world to pay for your hobby. Yeah.

JOE EXOTIC (THROUGH PHONE): At least that we have man enough to say, look, I own a roadside zoo and I breed tigers. I'm stuck trying to figure out why the hell I'm in jail, for first of all.

MARIANA (VOICEOVER): To be clear, Joe Exotic is behind bars because he was convicted of the attempted murder for hire of Carole Baskin, as well as 17 wildlife crimes.

CARNEY ANNE NASSER: In the words of the judge at Joe Exotic's sentencing, Joe is a master manipulator who is engaged in, quote, "systematic trafficking" of tigers and other big cats.

MARIANA (VOICEOVER): Yet, critics of "Tiger King" say the series celebrated Joe, while largely overlooking his treatment of animals.

CARNEY ANNE NASSER: Joe is not a folk hero. He is somebody who, for decades, profited off of the exploitation and abuse of animals. And Joe is finally where he belongs.

MARIANA (VOICEOVER): So why would you want to breed a tiger? Well, in the US, roadside zoos can bring in big money by offering cow petting experiences to tourists.

JOHN GOODRICH: They raise tiger cubs, so that people can pay money and take selfies, so they have to have this constant supply of these little tiny tiger cubs between one and four months. So there's just this huge breeding operation, but the key thing here is that after the cubs are about four months old, they're too dangerous for the public to handle. They need to be handed off somewhere. And often, I don't think we really know what happens to them.

MARIANA (VOICEOVER): To understand the scope of the issue, "National Geographic" magazine reviewed Joe Exotic's records from 2010 to 2018, and learned that his zoo traded nearly 200 tigers with dozens of other private owners across America. Breeders, like Joe, are one of the reasons that there are now an estimated 5 to 10,000 tigers in the United States. With less than 4,000 tigers left in the wild, there are now more tigers living in captivity in the US than there are wild tigers living in the rest of the world.

JOE EXOTIC (THROUGH PHONE): If something's endangered, hell, we need to start breeding it, do we not? Is that not what the purpose of it being endangered is? We need more of.

[Ominous music playing]

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