How Not to Be a Tiger King – The New York Times

NASHVILLE Once in the bluest of blue moons, the zeitgeist produces a cultural phenomenon so bizarre and so universally discussed as to be nearly inescapable. This spring, in the spirit of pet rocks, mood rings and streaking, Netflix launched Tiger King, a documentary series that landed online at the very moment a pandemic moved our lives online, too.

A show about a murderous feud between the owner of a roadside zoo and a media-savvy animal rights advocate sounded promising to me. There are more tigers in captivity in the United States than there are in the wild, and a huge percentage of those captive tigers are kept in hideous conditions. Tiger King seemed like the perfect opportunity to raise awareness of the plight of captive tigers and possibly inspire Congress to pass the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which would go a long way toward protecting these magnificent apex predators.

Tiger King did nothing of the sort. The documentary is less about tigers than about polygamy, misogyny, suicide, murder for hire, drug addiction and a narcissistic animal abuser named Joseph Maldonado-Passage a.k.a. Joe Exotic who enjoys cult hero status in some circles, despite being sentenced to 22 years in prison for wildlife crimes.

One reason for all the captive tigers is, of course, capitalism. People will pay a shocking amount of money to have their picture taken with a cute tiger cub or a cute cheetah or lion cub but the nonlethal stage of a big cats life is only a few weeks. Once its too big to generate money in a cub-petting scheme, its destined for a roadside zoo, a tiny backyard cage, a canned hunt or a surreptitious, point-blank execution.

Mr. Maldonado-Passages 15 minutes of fame have expired, but social media sites are still crammed with videos of people playing with wild animals, both those bred for the pet trade and those taken from the wild and reared as pets. The desire to bond with animals seems to be baked into human nature, but the internet has turned this urge into a performance art, and those expensive photos with tiger cubs are just the tip of the iceberg. Every squirrel that sits on a human shoulder, like every chipmunk that comes to a human whistle, is now the sidekick in a show. Post a selfie with a baby cottontail cuddled to your cheek, and watch the likes pile up. On Instagram, everyone is Joe Exotic.

Spring is baby season in the natural world, and all around the country right now, good-hearted people are rescuing lost baby animals and turning them into pets. The impulse is easy to understand. A fledgling songbird looks far too fragile to be tossed into the world. Baby bunnies in a nest seem too vulnerable to be left on their own, right out in the open like that. A fawn sleeping alone in the shadows looks like its been served up to a coyote. Its only compassionate to bring the little lost ones inside and feed them whatever the internet says they eat, right?

The trouble with these good intentions is that most orphaned animals arent orphans at all. Natures way of keeping vulnerable youngsters safe is often to hide them in a place where the parents activity wont draw the attention of predators. A mother cottontail deliberately leaves her babies alone all day, feeding them once in the early morning and once in the evening. A doe hides her newborn fawn while she forages for food. A hollering baby bird that looks pitifully abandoned almost certainly has frantic parents nearby, desperately hoping the giant biped predators will go away.

The only thing wild animals need from us, in most cases, is to keep our true pets indoors while their youngsters are learning how the big world works.

The big world is very hard on baby animals, and some of these babies will be injured and some of their parents will be killed. But in those cases, the frightened baby doesnt need a warm box in your kitchen, eating leftovers and serving as a prop in social media posts.

What it needs is to be taken to a licensed wildlife rehabilitation specialist who knows how to care for it properly and, later, how to reintroduce it safely into the wild, far from human habitation. A wild animal habituated to human presence is an animal that someone else is bound to kill for fear it might be rabid.

Leaving nature to its own devices is very hard if youre paying any attention at all. I, too, have been guilty of intervening where I did not belong shooing off the crow intent on eating the cardinal nestlings, bringing the monarch caterpillars indoors to raise safely away from cardinals. But a crow has babies to feed, too, and captive-raised monarchs, it turns out, are weaker than their wild siblings. Once back in the garden, such butterflies may be passing inferior genes on to the next generation.

Interacting in a healthy way with wild animals may come down to making peace with a truth thats very hard for a compassionate person to accept: Every living thing we see, as well as every living thing we dont, is either predator or prey. Or both. If we truly care about the wild animals that burrow under our toolsheds and clamber across our grass and shelter in our trees, we must find a way to accept the casual brutality of the natural world. We must teach ourselves to let the wild things be wild.

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.

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How Not to Be a Tiger King - The New York Times