I don’t know about you, but personally I feel like 2020 has gone on for such a long time that Carole Baskin and the general discourse around Netflix’s Tiger King series feels like it happened a decade ago. Supposedly there is some scientific explanation for this feeling — that time is warped and we’re all living in a simulation — and it all comes down to the repetitive nature of daily life during lockdown, which has changed our memory perception and how we process the passage of time. So that’s neat! But anyway, yeah, Carole Baskin is back again!
And she has some things to say about the presence of big pussies (sorry) in the new video for Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s instant song of the summer, WAP. In an interview with Deadline the animal lover said that scenes in the video which feature a cheetah and a tiger “glamourise the idea of rich people having tigers as pets”.
“That makes every ignorant follower want to imitate by doing the same. After tigers are too old for pay to play sessions by people like Joe Exotic, Bhagavan Antle, Marc McCarthy, Mario Tabraue and others, they become a liability instead of an asset,” she went on to say. “While I think most are destroyed behind closed gates at that point, some end up being given away to people who want to have a tiger to show off. That never works out and the cats either die or end up dumped in sanctuaries or, worse yet, breeding mills. Either way, it’s always abusive to the cat.”
Which is all fine except that the big cats in the WAP video are clearly CGI’d in rather than being actually present on set with the girls. However, as Carole points out, even stock footage of CGI animals — which is at least better than using the real thing — has to be captured at some point using a green screen. “That doesn’t happen in the wild,” she says. “It can’t happen in sanctuaries like ours where cats have plenty of room to avoid a green screen (or would shred it if offered access and could die from ingesting it). That tells me they probably dealt with one of the big cat pimps, who makes a living from beating, shocking and starving cats to make them stand on cue in front of a green screen in a studio. That’s never good for the cat.”
I didn’t have “Carole Baskin accuses Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion of getting their pussies from a big cat pimp” on my 2020 bingo card, and yet here we are. What a year!