3 Reasons Why US is Epicenter for Big Cat Breeding, Trading

Netflix’s “Tiger King” fixated our gaze on the outlandish antics of Exotic Joe, but if you squint your eyes in just the right way, you could catch a glimpse of why wildlife trafficking has proliferated in the United States.

The documentary, which has been among Netflix’s most-watched shows in the United States for weeks, features several unaccredited, or what are termed “roadside zoos,” whose owners are hardly poster boys for animal conservation efforts. One zoo in Miami is owned by a convicted Cuban-American drug trafficker, Mario Tabraue, who fancies himself the inspiration for the infamous “Scarface” character, Tony Montana, and was featured on another animal trafficking documentary in 1994.

Another, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, has a workforce that he barely pays and uses to recruit for his personal harem, the documentary says. And another, Jeff Lowe, is an unabashed partier who the documentary says was questioned by police for beating his wife and brags about using baby tigers to lure women into hotel-room parties in Las Vegas.

But the heart of the documentary is the gun-toting, blonde-mullet-sporting, three-way-marriage-having Joseph Maldonado-Passage, aka Joe Exotic. Like many animal collectors, Maldonado-Passage began because of his love for tigers (the last episode of the documentary has some early footage of him that shows him in a more sympathetic light).

But money, professional jealousy and drugs—or a combination of all three—steadily undermined his cause, and soon Maldonado-Passage was speed-breeding big cats and charging visitors large sums of money to pass around the adorable furry baby tigers.

The trouble, of course, is that baby tigers grow up. At eight weeks, baby tigers can seriously injure someone. But because they are born in captivity, they will not survive in the wild, so they remain captive, are sold—mostly in the black market via the internet, to collectors and unaccredited zoos—or are killed by their owners.

https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/us-epicenter-big-cat/