The popular docuseries fails to address issues critical to tiger conservation, but we can all learn from what it leaves out. My colleague Sharon Wilcox and I wrote an op-ed for The Revelator one what Tiger King shows us about much broader issues on exhibit during the show. "Last month Netflix unleashed its captivating but sensationalized docuseries, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. The public, hungry for something new to binge-watch while they sheltered in place in the developing pandemic, quickly ate it up and made it a pop-culture sensation in a wave of social-media posts, memes and virtual water-cooler discussions. But amidst all this amusement, shock, titillation and general confusion, the tragic story of the tigers at the heart of Tiger King has been eclipsed by the outsized egos of their human captors. Looking beyond the “Hatfields and the McCoys” approach of the series to examine the issues the program fails to dig into, we find several key lessons about the threats tigers and other charismatic species face in a world that values them more as entertainment than as wild animals and living creatures." Continue reading the op-ed here, for the five lessons we point out. This op-ed is a great tool for anyone teaching human-animal relations, human-wildlife conflict, illegal wildlife trade, and more. Particulalry this op-ed has tie ins to lessons on the nexus of the attention economy, ego, animals, and more.
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