The celebrity conservationist has always insisted that she was pitched a very different show about the illegal big cat market in the U.S. when she signed on for the Joe Exotic's hit Netflix series.
- September 8, 2021
AceShowbiz - Celebrity conservationist Carole Baskin has finally landed the documentary she thought "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness" would be.
The wildlife savior became a star thanks to Joe Exotic's Netflix series but she has always confessed she was pitched a very different show about the illegal big cat market in the U.S. when she signed on for "Tiger King".
But that show has brought her acclaim and the chance to get behind a new film, "The Conservation Game", about a retired police officer tracking down missing lions, tigers, and leopards.
"Last year people discovered there are hundreds of big cats that are being kept by people that are pretty irresponsible and reckless and this shows where that started," Carole tells Access Live.
And she reveals many of the animals were once "cute little cubs" on TV shows.
"They [producers] were being told they were coming from big accredited zoos and there were these conservationists that everybody trusted saying they came from the big zoos... and that's not true. They were coming from some of these horrible backyard breeders and going into places that were even worse, or just disappearing altogether."
The new project exposes the many different state laws across America, with Baskin revealing there is no legislation preventing people from owning big cats in Nevada, Wisconsin, Alabama or South Carolina.
She claims "The Conservation Game" is the project she hoped "Tiger King" would be, explaining producers pitched that series as "the next Blackfish" - a documentary that exposed the cruel practice of keeping orcas at amusement parks.
"We were all on board for that... but that turned out not to be what 'Tiger King' produced," Carole notes, adding that the same producers reached out to her last year (2020) about a "Tiger King" sequel.
"They said, 'We just wanna clear the air with you,' and I had heard they had gone around to some of the other members of the cast and were saying, 'We want you to sign on...' and their contracts were saying they weren't allowed to talk to anybody about anything that they had seen or witnessed in this industry, and I told them just to lose my number," Baskin explains. "I wasn't going to be silenced by them."
