Confession: I have not watched Tiger King. At first glance this makes me an odd fit for writing about Tiger King. Afterall, with 64 million households having streamed the show in its first four weeks on Netflix, surely there is no dearth of people who can write from the perspective of one who has seen the show. In The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert asked “Why can’t the rest of us look away?” Why indeed. Yet, looking away is both the challenge and the solution for a show like Tiger King and the display of exotic animals. Tiger King is a master class in the problem of looking; something we can neither look at nor look away from without significant moral consequences. With Tiger King once again in the headlines, we should think together about charismatic megafauna and the problem of looking.
Tiger King’s enormous popularity is unsurprising. As one of its directors, Eric Goode, told The New York Times “How can you not be fascinated with polygamy, drugs, cults, tigers, potential murder? It had all the ingredients that one finds salacious. So we knew that there would be an appetite for it.” Add to this a feud between the “Tiger King,” Joe Exotic, and Carole Baskin the owner of Big Cat Rescue, a sanctuary for large cats— a feud that ends with the former imprisoned for a conspiracy to murder the latter— and it is no wonder people watch.
The makers of Tiger King knew they were on to something because their show involves charismatic megafauna of both the human and nonhuman animal varieties. I will focus chiefly on the latter and return to the former briefly at the end of this piece. In the nonhuman animal world, charismatic megafauna are the large, exotic, often beautiful and “majestic” animals humans are very fond of (e.g., elephants, pandas, chimpanzees, gorillas, lions, and of course tigers). Zoos rely on their charismatic megafauna to engage zoo-goers and obtain donations. Have a look at the home page of your local accredited zoo and you will see for yourself the pull of charismatic megafauna. Unfortunately, people are often distracted from what really matters when offered an opportunity to gaze upon the bright colors and bold physicality of charismatic megafauna.
On the one hand, looking away is a problem. Tiger King uses abused and exploited charismatic animals to form the backdrop for calamitously awful human behavior that includes, in addition to animal abuse and exploitation, misogyny, drug-dealing, intimate partner abuse, and violence. In explaining to friends why, despite being an animal ethicist, I am not watching the show one replied, “But you don’t really see too much animal abuse.” The other texted me two days later to say “You might skip episode 4 in terms of animal treatment. ☹” That one could get to episode 4 of a show about people who breed, traffic in, confine, and display wild animals before seeing something “upsetting” is problematic. Exploited and abused animals should not be a backdrop in a show about those who exploit them and those who attempt to offer them sanctuary.
To watch the show and look away from the treatment of the animals, being dazzled instead by their charisma, is to miss the full force of the tragedy the story tells. Looking at the animals is problematic as well, however. This is well-traveled terrain in the literature on the practice of displaying animals, particularly in zoos. As Ralph Acampora wrote in “Zoos and Eyes: Contesting Captivity and Seeking Successor Practices,” “…insofar as it effectively forces its show-items into an overexposure that degrades their real nature, the zoo can be seen to partake in the paradoxical form of pornography defined as visive violence.” Animals who are displayed for human entertainment or education have no option for averting the objectifying gaze of patrons.
One reason people enjoy visiting zoos and watching shows like Tiger King is that most wild animals are evasive when left to their own devices. They prefer not to see us as much as we hanker to see them. Displaying animals for profit is an act of human domination and control. Tiger King facilitates and normalizes the practice of looking at other animals who have no choice but to be ogled. As a result, it is part of a long history of reifying animals (and women) as objects for humans’ literal and figurative consumption, a practice Carol Adams has written about extensively. Tiger King viewers want more, not less of the kind of charismatic megafauna Joe Exotic displays. The show should have taught us that the looking at needs to stop.
I mentioned the problematic pull of charismatic megafauna in an essay I wrote about animal sanctuaries. Talking about Big Cat Rescue, I wrote that even an animal ethicist like myself can easily get distracted from the moral lesson when provided the opportunity to gaze at big cats. Despite the educational information offered by a sanctuary volunteer and my commitment to animals’ moral significance, I was still drawn to looking at the tigers; distracted by their compelling beauty and size. That distraction made me morally uncomfortable and underscored the problem of subjecting animals to the human gaze even in a sanctuary setting.
The problem of looking at also manifests in the false moral equivalence the show makes between zoos and animal sanctuaries. Understandably, most viewers are not informed about the important moral distinctions between zoos and sanctuaries. Indeed, zoos expend significant effort blurring those lines for the public. As a result, most viewers are not positioned to know what they are looking at. Catherine Doyle notes in “Captive Wildlife Sanctuaries: Definition, Ethical Considerations and Public Perception,” that true sanctuaries prioritize animals’ welfare over other considerations and do not breed animals or permit direct contact between visitors and the animals. As Marino et al argue, “Sanctuaries reflect the perspective of the animal, not the human visitor – or the pocketbook. Zoos are established specifically for human objectives.”
In a world where confining animals in exhibits for human entertainment is normalized, proliferating the distortion that Joe Exotic’s zoo is on the same moral footing as true animal sanctuaries is profoundly problematic. We will never stop the breeding and exploitation of exotic animals for human purposes if we think that those who breed and display them are engaged in the same kind of work as those who dedicate their lives to providing exploited and abused animals the safety and security of sanctuary.
The tragedies depicted in Tiger King cross the species line to be sure. Though the term has not to my knowledge been used previously to describe humans, one might say that human animals in Tiger King, too, come in a variety of “charismatic” forms. Surely a man who calls himself “Joe Exotic,” drives around with tiger cubs in his lap, sports a bleached-blond mullet, and dresses like a cross between Ted Nugent and Liberace qualifies as human charismatic megafauna if anyone does. Though I do not have the room to explore this fully here, I believe there are also ethical dimensions to looking at the human charismatics and, as Willa Paskin called them in Slate, human “noncharismatics,” on display in Tiger King. Viewers are drawn to looking at the mullet, tattoos, and missing teeth and thus are looking away from important questions about economic status, exploitation, and workplace violence.
Regarding the nonhuman animals, our looking away should involve literally looking away. Using Marilyn Frye’s distinction between arrogant and loving attention, Karen Warren wrote about the importance of humans moving away from an arrogant to a loving perception of nature. In the case of many captive wild animals, perceiving them lovingly will ideally involve not looking at them at all. Our looking at should involve seeing animals not as props or background in the bad behavior of our conspecifics, but as central characters exploited and marginalized by behavior that is normalized by speciesism. The looking at needs to lead to a rejection of that exploitation and marginalization rather than to more looking.
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Asia Ferrin, Ben Almassi, and Jeremy Mazner for thoughtful feedback on drafts of this post.
Karen S. Emmerman
Karen S. Emmerman is an independent scholar and part-time faculty at the University of Washington. She is also the Philosopher-in-Residence at John Muir Elementary School in Seattle. Karen writes on ecofeminism, animal ethics, and philosophy for children.
