Tiger King

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness (titled onscreen as simply Tiger King) is a 2020 Netflix documentary series about the life of American zookeeper and convicted felon Joe Exotic, and his feud with American animal rights activist Carole Baskin.

Joe Exotic

Hey, I'm Joe Exotic, otherwise known as the Tiger King, the gay, gun-carrying redneck with a mullet.

People don’t come to see the tigers; they come to see me.

Ladies and gentlemen, before you hear it on the news, I'm gonna tell you. About an hour ago we had an incident where one of the employees stuck their arm through the cage and a tiger tore her arm off... I can give you your money back or I can give you a rain check.

Oh my God. I am never going to financially recover from this.

Political condoms. Vote for me or you’ll need these because you’re screwed.

I’m outspoken, good looking, love to party and have fun.

Are the animals happy? Who knows?

I can assure you’re going to get closer to tigers and lions here than you would anywhere in the world. Matter of fact, you’re gonna get so close I can almost promise you some of you will be urinated on.

I’d shoot you before I’d shoot my cat.

This is my own little town. I’m the mayor, the prosecutor, the cop, and the executioner.

Me and Carole made money off each other. We became popular off of each other because I was her number one most wanted cub abuser that she could make money off of, and she was my number one murdered-her-husband-and-fed-him-to-the-tigers-and…crazy bitch out there that I could make music videos and shit about.

The woman's just obsessed with me.

Do you know why animals die in cages? Their soul dies.

We say no to drugs, because drugs make your teeth fall out and you get really ugly and don’t have any friends.

'Do you watch porn?’ He said yeah. I said, ‘Well do you like watching the guy with the big one doing it or the guy with the little one doing it?’ He said, ‘Well, obviously you want to watch the guy with the big one.’ I said, ‘Well, you ain’t that straight.’

It is a ticking time bomb if somebody thinks they’re going to walk in here and take my animals away. It’s gonna be a small Waco.

Does it feel good to stand on my stage with 500-pound tigers and everybody envy you? Absolutely.

Carole Baskin. Yep, that lady who profits over $1.5m, suckin’ on your heartstrings about shit on the internet that ain’t even true!

Carole's bitchin' that she's got this big gray cloud over her head over people thinking she fed her husband to the tigers.

If you're an animal rights person, and you try and come into this facility.... this is what you're gonna be dealing with!

Her sanctuary is probably worse than most people’s backyards. I mean the cages are tiny, the weeds are shoulder high. It is literally a wire jungle in a mess of trees.

Before you bring me down, it is my belief that you will stop breathing.

I went to work every day prepared to die in a tiger cage. Dying doesn’t scare me. At all.

The first thing is, I am not cutting my hair. I am not changing the way I dress, I refuse to wear a suit. I am gay, I've had two boyfriends most of my life… I've had some kinky sex, I've tried drugs. I'm broke as shit, I have a judgement against me from some bitch down there in Florida, I paid the fine with the USJ… that does not mean I was convicted of any kind of animal cruelty thing. I have one of the biggest facilitates for exotic animals in this country as far as private individuals go. I am Joe Exotic, and don't forget, I am now stepping my foot in the ring to run for President.

And it didn’t matter how stupid he had to get, or if I was sitting there concentrating as hard as I could on the computer to write a letter to a senator or a congressman or something else, he’d come and rub them balls in my face. Everybody that works here knows exactly what I’m talking about, ’cause you’ve seen his balls. They were like golden nuggets to that boy.

Carole Baskin

Hey all you cool cats and kittens. It's Carole from Big Cat Rescue.

Our mission is to ban the private possession of these magnificent animals.

A tiger needs 400 square miles of territory in the wild. So there’s no cage that’s going to be sufficient.

I don’t pay anybody to do animal care, because people will do that for free.

I don’t watch news on television, unless there’s a cat involved.

Frequently, these people that have these animals will use them as a lure to bring in young people that really haven’t had the opportunity yet to build a lot of relationships and understand how badly they’re being abused themselves. And they’re using those animals as the way of forcing these people into labor camps.

You can see how they go from being so sweet to tearing your face off, just like that, and it’s amazing to have that range.

If somebody wanted to kill you, then they would put, like, sardine oil all over you. Something the cat wants to eat, not something the cat wants to drool on.

Howard Baskin

People like Joe have an amazing grip over people, generating and affection and a devotion that is totally irrational.

Seeing you in spring time, I never could go!

Doc Antle

So, I’m Dr. Bhagavan Antle… B. H. A. G. A. V. A. N… Antle… A. N. T. L. E… Dr. Bhagavan Antle.

I grew up a professional cowboy in a family of professional cowboys.

I am so well-known as Big Cat Guy around the world, that people who are against people having relationships with animals, period, want to destroy me because I am out there in the forefront, so known of being this guy who is in love with big cats and has them love him back.

He’s a completely insane, gay, gun-toting, drug-addict fanatic.

Most of us are not ruthless. People who love animals are rarely ruthless.

High-quality social media, duping tons of teenage children to devote their days and times to the cause that she has. And so they go to Big Cat Rescue, a derelict, rundown, backyard collection of 12 cats, and think they’re going to the world’s greatest big cat sanctuary.

You’re leading me down a road where people are just gonna say, “You have to join a f***ing cult to be a tiger trainer.

Rick Kirkham

Where do you want to start? I guess at the beginning somewhere. It was a crazy beginning.

You know, I’ve done a lot of shit in my life, but I’ve never experienced anything like Joe Exotic.

He was like a mythical character living out in the middle of bumf*ck Oklahoma who owned 1,200 tigers and lions and bears and shit.

If he ever had an enemy in his life, it was Carole Baskin.

She wanted to shut down the zoo. And he wanted her gone.

He started getting so crazy to where he had a rubber blow up doll and he would have Carol written on a name-tag on it and he would take a dildo and be shoving it in her mouth.

I told Joe at least three times Travis was not gay, okay? Travis was banging every girl in the park.

John Reinke

You know, there’s not every day that a zookeeper went to prison for murder-for-hire. So, I’m sure y’all got a story to tell.

Animal people are nuts, man. And I might be one of them people. I don’t know, but they’re all half-out there man.

I keep telling myself over and over, I’m involved in a federal murder-for-hire plot. Who’d have thought? Just because I stopped by a zoo to feed a bear one day.

Kelci "Saff" Saffery

Nobody wins. Everyone involved is a so-called animal advocate. Not a single animal benefited from this war. Not a single one.