Recently, I was rewatching Tiger King, maybe due to some pandemic-era sarcastic nostalgia or simply because a friend hadn’t seen it. It was a great watch. An anxious watch also. As the show wrapped up, I was struck with a sense of sadness that our friend Joe did, in fact, go to prison for his activities in the end, and I strangely will miss him.
I felt a sense of compassion for our controversial protagonist that I did not exactly remember feeling the first time. Perhaps the politics of our time have shaped me. Or I underestimate how my background in psychology leads me to explain toxic behavior through analysis and speculative diagnosis. (Shhh, yes, it’s unprofessional. And yes, I think everyone does it.)
There is a moment in the final wrap-up of Joe recognizing the tragedy of two chimps he held in separate, tight enclosure cages, hugging for the first time in ten years, within a day when the zoo is taken from him. He laments his mistakes as a zoo owner, admitting his distractions as a business owner prevented him from seeing and correcting this injustice. As he speaks, we see footage of one of the chimps’ human-like hand reaching out for another squeeze from Joe, clearly lonely and desperately deprived of company.
Many interviewed in this story would stay, Joe is lying that he feels bad, and I find myself on the fence. People do manipulate and lie, but in general, I’m convinced a majority of people feel a mix of positive and negative emotions and intentions, and it’s just as possible Joe’s self-realization and regret were genuine. It seems Joe genuinely liked animals, even if, at such a scale, abuse was inevitable, and the business aspect created a situation where it was encouraged.
Capitalism encourages commodification and abuse.
This week, ICE recently raided an apartment complex in Chicago, supposedly associated with gangs. Black American citizens and Latino citizens were disappeared on segregated buses, including children who were woken up in the middle of the night, separated from families, and zip-tied together.
Some digging revealed the owners of the poorly-managed complex were underwater financially: Venezuelan tenants were on rental assistance that was running out, and there are rumors that the raid may have been financially motivated — potentially a coordinated effort to rapidly empty, sell, and flip the building. Reports of a similar operation happening in Aurora, Colorado, were compared to this. While every motive is not confirmed, it seems both plausible and horrifying that many dehumanizing practices are a result at least partly of profit-driven motives, let alone racist ones. The commodification of life and the dehumanizing practices that follow are not just limited to our treatment of animals but also our treatment of fellow human beings.
As the administration in the United States and other global powers shift into more pro-fascist actions and ideology, I often wonder about the “sliding scale” of how evil or confused people can become. Joe Exotic himself ran for multiple political offices unsuccessfully as a libertarian, his loyal campaign manager mentioning emphatically that Joe didn’t even know what a libertarian was.
I got a chuckle from that as a political-science nerd. It figures. Of course, a gun-toting zoo owner and exotic animal breeder would be a libertarian. Of course, Joe Exotic would fit that and not even know what it means. I think this is a very aesthetically and culturally American thing, really. The man of freedom, the man of manifest destiny, the man with the power and the guns, the man who can’t be bothered to ask questions first and maybe shoot later. Who is what he is, and perhaps doesn’t even know it.
There’s something warm and comforting about that level of crazy. Something human in it. Just as human as the regrets that come later after realizing the harm one has caused to other sentient things when the dust has settled (and after “the animal rights people” have come for you).
I don’t actually think Joe Exotic ever set out to abuse animals. I think the exploitation ramped up slowly. And I think it’s a feature of capitalism – that thing we’re not allowed to criticize now – that to keep his business afloat, the animals were naturally ostensibly commodified.
But every animal lover knows deep down this is not how life should be. If you love your fellow animals, you treat them like family. You never act like they’re nothing more than a commodity.
But our market system under capitalism necessitates this. I think it makes us dead to the feelings of the living things we do commodify. In a world where only profit matters, the commodification of sentient life – and the deadening of natural emotions like empathy – becomes inevitable.
Joe Exotic probably didn’t *want* to hurt the animals he lived and worked with. It simply became a necessary part of his business. And who amongst us has not made concessions before for our own corporate overlords?
This past week, Jane Goodall, the famous animal rights activist, passed at age 91 while on a speaking tour. My Internet feed has since erupted with a slightly monotonous stream of images and memorials to her—and one strikingly salient post from a native person lamenting how she is famous for perspective shifts our fellow indigenous communities have never had to “relearn”. While I, too, have been raised to see her as a beacon of hope for environmentalists and animal rights activism, as I grow older and more tired, I also find it kind of sad that she is famed for shifting global perspectives on animal rights in a direction that should have always been considered simple common sense.
I imagine what Joe’s life could have looked like if we lived in a more supportive and inclusive animal-loving world— one with less trauma and stress and more nurturing education and community. Where the “animal rights people” have won, but guys like Joe don’t mind because their passion for training and proximity to these beautiful creatures is largely undisrupted and better resourced and regulated.
(Arguably, the best part about the show Tiger King, is that Joe’s arch nemesis, Carole Baskin, and all the rest of the cast of characters are all strikingly similar to one another in flaws and questionable labor practices.) —Even the “animal rights people” seem hypocritical and suspicious. After all, Carol Baskin, his nemesis, was once a breeder too. So why couldn’t Joe’s operation have hope for progressive reforms someday as well? Granted, post-human-murder-plan, this rosier ending to their story seems less plausible.
What if even a fraction of the 40 billion the U.S. just pledged overseas to Argentina or Israel went back into our national parks and restoration programs locally, or went to subsidize social safety nets, infrastructure, and animal rescue facilities? Perhaps ones that could help prevent organizations like Joe’s from necessitating breeding to financially sustain operations, and bring fellow animal lovers gone astray back into the fold?
Breeding large exotic -and perhaps any- animals in captivity for human entertainment is wrong, but as we learn, thousands of these animals exist in captivity because of this community, and it will take years to phase out if such regulations are ever actually successful. Like many things in life begging for progressive reform, there will likely be interim stages and compromises in strategy. It makes sense that people want to see and -more importantly- love these animals. There is no disagreement from anyone on that, just on how and whom.
More likely, we may end up with generations of more and more domesticated large cats, I imagine, potentially changing their genetics drastically. Like many animals in our climate-impacted kingdom, domestication is becoming an increasing survival strategy for the non-human world— one that I would argue, as an ecopsychologist, they shouldn’t have to do.
There’s a theory of restoration that states humans should, in fact, free up 50% of the earth to give back to wildlife, and I’m a strong proponent of it as the most logical solution to the majority of our extinction and climate crisis today. In such a world, species that are at risk of extinction – including many large cats – would in many cases naturally revive themselves simply by lack of contact with human urban environments.
We don’t need more big cats (or any animals) bred in captivity more than we need our own species to limit the spaces on earth where all other life needs to be captive on our behalf. We don’t need to manage other wildlife, at least not nearly as much as we must learn to sustainably manage ourselves.
And in a time of the rise of fascism and late capitalism, we could also apply the wisdom of rights for all life to issues between us within our own species. It isn’t really our job as human animals to police, imprison, or commodify life. And no living thing (perhaps not even crazy old Joe) belongs locked in a cage.
News, Notes, and Advocacy:
House Passes Big Cat Public Safety Act
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