The Netflix documentary “Tiger King” took us all by storm last year, and almost instantly, Carole Baskin’s name was all over the media. In this episode, we talk to Baskin about overnight fame, and we learn how she copes with accusations and the trauma of it all. Finally, she reveals the effects all of this has had on Big Cat Rescue. Tune in for Part 1 of our series with the “Big Cat Lady!”
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Lions, Tigers, And Carole Baskin, Oh My! Part 1 [Episode 51]
Welcoming Carole Baskin
Hey, all you cool cats and kittens.
As Carole Baskin would say.
Welcome to Understanding the Human Condition with your host, Dr. James Flowers.
I am beyond thrilled.
I don’t think either one of us laughed ever since she said yes.
I know. I was so happy when Carole said yes. We have Carole Baskin from the Netflix documentary Tiger King but, more importantly, from Big Cat Rescue. Welcome, Carole.
Thank you for having me, and I don’t know what to say because you already used my line.
It will sound better coming from you.
I know. That’s why I threw in “as Carole Baskin would say” because we don’t want to rip it off from her.
Is that how you answer your phone? “Hey, all you cool cats and kittens.”
No.
It’s an honor having you here, and we thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be here. I’m super excited about doing this podcast with you. As everybody knows, Tiger King took us all by storm almost instantly. Carole Baskin’s name has really become a household name around the world. Today, we talk about her overnight success and the effect it’s had on her mental health because it’s not easy to be Carole Baskin, I can imagine.
Carole, tell us about Big Cat Rescue.
Big Cat Rescue is a sanctuary located in Tampa, Florida, on 67 acres. We have about 50 exotic cats, lions, tigers, leopards, cougars, bobcats, jaguars, caracals, servals, some cats probably people never heard of. Our main goal is to put ourselves out of business. We don’t think cats belong in cages, and so for the past 30 years, we have been trying to pass legislation that would make it illegal for people to have them in backyards and basements. Once that ends, Big Cat Rescue can close our doors forever. We’ll still do bobcat rehab and release or Florida panther rehab and release, but we just don’t want to see a world where wild cats are kept in cages.
We just had that example right here in our own home city of Houston, Texas. It was out in a suburb of Houston where a tiger got out of someone’s back door and started walking through the neighborhood and then disappeared. Thank goodness someone found it. I believe that cat is somewhere up near Dallas. I’m not sure where, Carole, but it’s just bizarre to me that someone would think that it’s okay to have a tiger or a big cat in their home.
That cat is currently at the Black Beauty Ranch, which is a sanctuary that is accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries and a really good sanctuary. That turned out so much better for that cat than it could have because that cat came face to face with the man with the gun.
He sure did.
It was just amazing that that officer had the presence of mind, he’s somebody you should interview.
Not to pull a trigger on a big cat staring at you. That’s the first thing I thought, thank goodness he didn’t kill that animal because he certainly could have. Carole, what drove your passion for Big Cat Rescue?
I always had a passion for saving domestic cats and kittens. When I was eight years old, I learned that domestic cats and kittens were being killed in shelters due to overpopulation. As a result, I was just fixated on fixing that. I left home at the age of fifteen. I often worked 2 and 3 jobs at a time. I still work seven days a week from 7:30 in the morning until 7:00 at night every single day, and if I take five days off in the year, that’s amazing for me. It’s because I was driven by that passion to fix that problem.
When I was seventeen, because I was spending time at vet’s offices, I realized what happens to a bobcat if they get hit by a car. The vet can usually fix them up in a few minutes, but then you’re talking months of rehab for them to go back to the wild. I’ve been doing that since I was seventeen. By the time I was in my 30s and had finally built my real estate business up to where it was pretty much on autopilot, I was looking to give back and do something really meaningful.
I did not intend for it to be big cats, but we ended up at an auction where we were buying llamas and turning them loose on big tracts of land that we had. The guy next to me was bidding on a bobcat. She was about six months old. The lady didn’t want her anymore because she grew up to be a bobcat. I leaned over to the guy and said, “When that cat grows up, she’s going to tear your face off.” He said he was a taxidermist and that he was just going to club her in the head in the parking lot and make a thin decoration out of her.
You are kidding.
Rescuing Big Cats From Fur Farms
I’m not, and so I burst out crying, and my husband Don started bidding. We probably paid more for that bobcat than anybody’s ever paid for a bobcat to not die in the parking lot. That led us to a fur farm to try and find a friend for her because she was a wretched pet, but she had been declawed, she was born in captivity, and she was born in a different state, so she couldn’t be released for all three of those reasons. We came home with 56 bobcats and lynx when we discovered that the fur farm was a fur farm, we didn’t know that when we went there. We ended up buying out all of the fur farms in the U.S. and had started working on buying out all of the cats that were in fur farms in Canada. That’s when I lost my husband in 1997, so we weren’t able to finish that in Canada.
As a result of all of the work that we do legislatively and raising awareness, the fur industry pretty much breathed its last in 2018, so it’s no longer an issue for exotic cats. Along the way, when people say, “If you build it, people will come,” people started calling and saying, “Would you take my lion? Would you take my tiger?” I’m thinking, what are these people doing with lions and tigers? At every point along the way, I naively thought that I could fix it, and I had no idea it would take this long, be this hard, and be this expensive, but I think we’re getting in on it. We’re finally getting close to the bill passing.
When you build it, people will come, and they started coming—asking me to take in their lions and tigers.
Speaking of expensive, how are you funded? I’m guessing it’s a 501(c)(3), but can people make donations? It’s got to be extremely expensive to run a farm or a rescue like you do.
It costs us between $3.5 and $4 million a year just to take care of the 50 cats that we currently have, and that’s just the food and vet care. That’s not any of the overhead of the sanctuary. I’m sorry, I confused two things. $3.5 to $4 million is the entire running of the sanctuary. When I think of a tiger, a lot of times I’ll use a number of $10,000 per tiger per year, and that’s just for food. That’s not the overhead. I apologize.
That’s okay.
$3.5 to $4 million a year, every day when I wake up, it’s like, how am I going to raise this money? It’s been really expensive. Up until 1995, we funded it through our real estate business, but in 1995, we became a 501(c)(3), and we started accepting donations. We started offsetting some of the costs by doing tours where people could come for a private tour, maybe like twenty people on a tour, and we’d walk them around the sanctuary for a couple of hours. At the end of them, take them back into the gift shop and have them call their member of Congress to support the bill to ban the private concession of big cats.
Every day I wake up knowing there’s so much to be done, so much to care for.
Amazing.
After COVID hit, we couldn’t do that. We’ve been closed to the public, and that’s like a million dollars of our income that’s gone.
Are you still closed because of COVID?
Yeah, that Delta variant. It’s worse here than it was at any point.
It’s just horrible down in Florida. Let’s talk just a little bit about how your business was affected by Tiger King. Did donations pour in? Did donations slow down? How did it affect you once Tiger King came out? How was your life changed?
We didn’t know how that was going to go because I actually watched Tiger King seven times. After I watched it the first time, and we binge-watched it like everybody else did because we could not believe that that was the result of five years of working with producers, at the end of it, we just said that was a missed opportunity.
It was supposed to be called Stolen Wildlife, and it was supposed to be about all of these issues that these cats face in captivity, the abuse they face, and how that’s causing the extinction of the wild. Instead, people got that freak show that was Tiger King. That was my first reaction. As soon as it was over, my phone started ringing, and people were just screaming obscenities at me about how they hated me, wanted to kill me and my family, and the cats.
I’m like, why do you want to kill the cats? They said because they don’t belong in cages. I’m like, did you not get that about me? How did you miss that? People did not get that about me after watching Tiger King, so that’s why I had to keep watching it again. I was like, how did they not understand who I am?
Coping With Public Scrutiny
That’s a great segue to the question that I wanted to ask, which is how did you cope with the overnight success, before, during, and after?
Even the overnight stress that was just piled upon you by people calling and saying you’re an awful person for using cages and what you weren’t doing.
What got you through it? How did you cope?
To finish answering your first question, you said, how did that impact us financially, and we didn’t know how that was going to impact us. We were curious as to whether or not that would be good or bad. It turned out to be flat. Our donations stayed pretty much the same last year and this year as they were from the year before Tiger King. All of our social media people are like, “You’re so famous now.” It’s like they grew by about the same amount that they did in years previous. It didn’t make much of an impact, which really surprised me. I thought it would have been really good or really bad, and it was just like, meh.
As far as how I took that personally, I don’t take it personally because, obviously, they don’t know who I am. It’s the conclusion that they drew and what they saw. I think it was a lot harder on my family than it was on me because if somebody’s saying something about you and you know it’s not true, you’re like, whatever. When somebody says that about somebody you love, and you feel you have to defend them, and that you have to just constantly be defending them, I felt bad that my family, friends, and volunteers were in that position because of the horrible impact of that show.
That was going to be my next question to you, how do you, your husband, and your staff really cope? But, importantly, how do you cope as a couple with this microscope on you constantly as a couple?
Nobody’s asked that, how we cope as a couple. It probably happened at a good time in that everybody was locked down, so it didn’t impact us so much because we weren’t going out. We weren’t going to have dinners out or go to the theater or do anything where we were really running into people. When we were going out in public, we usually had masks on.
Even despite that, I’m surprised how recognizable I’ve become just by my voice. In fact, I flew in from D.C. a couple of nights ago, and the people in front of me were having a problem where the man couldn’t wake up, and the woman was getting all freaked out. I said, “You want me to holler for a doctor?” and she said, “Yes.” And so, I yelled for a doctor, and everybody said, “Carole Baskin’s on board?” They could hear my voice.
That’s great.
I can’t talk in public either?
That’s right.
Your husband described you as a logical person, and you’ve seemed to maintain a really relaxed disposition through all of this. What are you doing to keep your mental health? Do you meditate? What do you do? Is it faith? What is it?
I think it’s a deep-seated belief, and my deep-seated belief is that everything is happening exactly as it should. No matter what happens in my life, for as long as I can remember, I always look at it like that was supposed to happen. Even though I’m not figuring it out right now what that is, it’ll come to me in a few days, or something will happen, and it’ll all kind of click together. I think the same is true here, that initially, it was like, what was the good that came out of Tiger King? Now I’m starting to see it because, when I was in D.C., I was able to get an audience with all of the chiefs of staff.
I could never do that before. I could beg, borrow, and plead, couldn’t get one with one chief of staff. It was always, you know, the animal person in the office that I’d be able to talk to. It’s given me a platform to talk about why we need this federal bill to pass that I wouldn’t have got any other way, I don’t think. There is some good that came of it.
Where are you with the federal bill, and where do you think that’s going to go?
I really thought we were going to get a vote in the House in July, and we just didn’t. I think it’s coming soon in September. We passed with a two-thirds majority vote in the House in December of last year, and it just, we ran out of time before the end of the year to get it in front of the Senate. We had to start all over in January, and we have 202 co-sponsors in the House, and it’s bipartisan. Thirty-eight of those are Republicans. In the Senate, I think we were up to like 24, and so it’s moving really fast through both chambers, and I really believe it will pass this year.
That’s wonderful. If someone wants to help you with this, who do they write or who do they call, and what do they say?
If they go to BigCatAct.com and put in their name and address, our system will know who your senators are and who your representatives are, and it will call them for you. All you have to do is stay on the line. People, if they’re free to talk to them, do it on the weekends or at night when it’s an answering machine. The answering machine comes on, and you say, “Please ask your boss to co-sponsor the Big Cat Public Safety Act.” You stay on the line, it calls the next one, then it calls the next one. You can also send an email, and you can send a tweet at the same time. That’s three different ways that you can reach all of your members of Congress with the ask that they become a co-sponsor of the bill.
That’s amazing, BigCatAct.com, so everybody, remember that, please, and go on and join that. I think it’s so important. Being an animal lover myself, I just have three dogs, not three big cats.
I just have two dogs, but we support you clearly.
Carole, just asking you a difficult question, how does it feel to live under the microscope of so many people around the country, on social media, saying awful things about you, even that you murdered your ex-husband or your former husband? How does that feel as a human being, and how do you cope with that piece of stress?
That has been really difficult because, for all these years since losing Don 23 years ago, the only people who ever said anything nasty like that were the animal abusers, a handful of people who were trying to take over our real estate business. Even when they would manage to get the media to do some kind of piece, like Hard Copy did a piece, People did a piece, and then later, I think it was in like 2005 or 2006, there was a story in the Tampa Tribune by a Leonora, maybe say a few times by Leonora LaPeter, just parroting the same people saying the same things.
It wasn’t an issue because anybody could go down to the court records, and they could see that Don wasn’t a millionaire when I met him. I didn’t break up his family. We were together for eleven years before his wife divorced him because she wanted to marry somebody at her church. Anybody that did any kind of research at all could find out the truth.
After Tiger King, there were just millions of people who watched very clever editing. I didn’t know anything about Hollywood or how things are produced, but we’re filming a show, and part of what they talk about is that you show, don’t tell. An example of that would be in Tiger King, where I’m saying that Joe Exotic and some of these people were saying that I ground Don up in a meat grinder.
That meat grinder had broken years before Don disappeared and had been gone for years before he disappeared. But it was a tiny little thing, the biggest thing we could put in it was a chicken leg. I’m saying that in Tiger King, they’re showing this like a wall-sized grinder, and it’s like, what the heck? People look at that, and they’re like, “She could have got a body into that.” They’re thinking, “I’m smarter than she is. I know she did that because I saw this.” They don’t realize what they saw was not anything like what the truth was.
Fighting Misinformation
I went through, like I said, seven times and created a page at BigCatRescue.org/Netflix, where, when you’re being shown something on the screen, here’s the actual evidence. Here’s the actual links to the court documents. Here’s the actual testimony or whatever it was. It shows that that was just fabricated. People want to be entertained. They don’t want to be educated.
People want to be entertained, not educated—and that can be a dangerous thing.
People want to be sensationalized and have this sensation, and some people thrive on sensationalism.
That’s like a train wreck, you can’t pull your eyes away, so that’s why they watch.
You just said that you’re working on a show. Are you at liberty to talk about it?
You can’t say where it’s going to be. We’re hoping it’ll be a series. We’re doing a pilot, and we’re expecting the pilot will probably come out in September, maybe October. What that show will be about is the work that we’ve actually been doing for the last 30 years because I think people would actually find that very entertaining. Joe is not the first person. In a healthy way, entertaining all of these animal abusers, at one point, they said they want to kill me. Some of them have physically attacked me in public.
Showing what that’s like when you go up against these very abusive, cruel people who are treating animals with so much animosity. Bringing them to justice, and that’s the whole thrust of the show. Some of those people are still out there, still doing bad things to cats, and we’re exposing who they are, what they’re doing, and then trying to pressure law enforcement to actually do something about it. Joe has been trying to hire a hitman to kill me since 2011. That was shot by Louis Theroux, and that aired in the UK on the BBC. After people saw that, they were like, “Maybe Joe wasn’t this really lovable character that we fell in love with in Tiger King.”
I am sure if someone hired a hitman to kill me, when I put my head down at night, it would be one of the things that I think about. When we think of trauma, that’s obviously a traumatic event in your life. It’s got to have an impact on you from a traumatic experience. How do you deal with that trauma of knowing that someone actually wanted or hired someone to kill you?
It’s been coming for so long that it wasn’t as immediate. Everybody who saw Tiger King thinks that this just happened in the last year. This has been going on for decades. One of the guys in Tiger King with the long beard, Dennis Hill, was the first person who ever threatened to kill me, but I knew who had threatened to kill me, and that was back in the late ’90s or early 2000s.
Joe had been filmed talking about hiring a hitman in 2011 with Louis Theroux, and then in 2015, two different people called me up and said Joe had tried to pay them or their spouse to kill me, and they were willing to talk to the police about it. I turned it over to the police, and nothing happened from that. It was just that last one where he tried to hire the $3,000 hitman. He was going to get caught for that one.
I think he was just the easiest of them to catch. To answer your question as far as how I feel about that, I heard, my house is really well insulated, and so I heard what sounded like shooting out in my front yard, but I was sitting there thinking, “I wonder if somebody’s shooting at the house or if that’s just somebody setting off their fireworks from the 4th of July still.”
I heard that missile sound that they make, and it’s just fireworks. There’s always that awareness when I hear that sort of thing that it could be directed at me, and I’ve had people actually shoot at my house in the middle of the night and wake me up. That has been something in my history that it’s like, this is real, this is like, you wake really fast when that happens.
Hearing that popping sound and sounding like a fire, and then hearing that missile sound from a firework, as you know, is probably what is called post-traumatic stress disorder. I can imagine that you suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from all of the people that have said these horrible things and Joe Exotic hiring someone to kill you. I would encourage you, I hope I have a therapist, I hope that you have a therapist and can process that on speed dial and stay healthy. What was the last conversation you actually had with Joe Exotic?
I’ve never had a conversation with him. Can you believe that?
No.
Get out.
Never have spoken to the man. I’ve only been in the room with him five times, and four of those were in court.
Often, people experience trauma, and they think that they’re fine. Have you experienced any physical pain, chronic pain, anything that you think has changed you in any way?
Not that I’m aware of.
No? Good for you.
I’m really healthy. I never get sick. I never get sick to the point where, in January of 2020, I was sick, and it was like, “I’m going to die because I have never in decades had anything.” I’m wondering if it was COVID because that was like, it knocked me for a loop, and then all of a sudden, everybody started getting sick. We had just had a huge event at the sanctuary in November before that, where people came from all around the world to the sanctuary, 600 people from everywhere, so that could have brought it all in.
I can imagine in my own life, one of my own therapy techniques on myself is I enjoy exercising, I enjoy running, and I can imagine that even though you get up at, I think you said, 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning and work till 6:00 or 7:00 at night, that’s also probably very therapeutic for you because of the passion that you have for the animals with whom you take care.
It really does help, and when I lost my husband back in 1997, people often said back then, “How are you able to cope with this? How are you able to deal with it?” It’s like, I have to get up every morning because there are 200 cats out there that have to be fed. If it weren’t for them, I think I probably would have lost my mind. There was so much that had to be done I couldn’t worry about wallowing in self-pity.
If it weren’t for these cats needing care, I might have lost my mind. They saved me.
Dr. Flowers, this is a pretty familiar phrase by someone who’s compartmentalized their PTSD?
Yeah, you’re exactly right. Sometimes people just shove it down. They don’t want to think about it, and they think that they’re processing it, and they’re not. It’s hidden in the back of their mind, and it comes out sideways in the form of negative relationships, abuse, trauma, future trauma.
Looking Ahead: What’s Next For Carole
Everyone join us next week as we learn about Carole Baskin, how she recovered after being assaulted by some teenagers, right?
Yes, and she’s also going to reveal what she did to stop attracting negative relationships with men.
That’s going to be a good one.
It is.
All that and more next week as we wrap up our two-part series with Carole Baskin right here on Understanding the Human Condition with Dr. James Flowers.
Thank you. We also want to remind you that a clear diagnosis is the key to the most effective treatment possible. Thank you, everyone. Bye.
