While The Wild Animal Park in Chittenango is delayed opening due to the coronavirus pandemic, owner Jeff Taylor has joined about 34 million other viewers to watch the Netflix docu-series series “Tiger King.”

The seven-part series was released on March 20 to a captive audience full of people staying home due to orders of social distancing. The plot centers on the conflict between Joe Maldonado-Passage, otherwise known as “Joe Exotic", a larger-than-life private zoo owner and Carole Baskin, an animal rights activist who runs a big cat sanctuary.

In the true crime series, we see the tension grow between Baskin and Exotic. She publicly campaigns to close Exotic’s zoo. He is convinced Baskin killed her husband in the nineties and said she is just another zoo owner who wants to shut down competition. After a series of “can-you-believe that” moments, Exotic ends up in jail and his former business partner Jeff Lowe takes over Exotic’s zoo and animals.

“Tiger King’s" viral viewership has created a stir on social media with memes, celebrity impersonations, TikTok parody songs, and campaigns to set Exotic free from jail. The series just released a follow-up episode to capture cast reactions after seeing it all on screen.

Taylor opened The Wild Animal Park in August 2012, just north of the village of Chittenango, New York. A childhood dream, he opened his private zoo with a pair of kangaroos, a dromedary camel named Aladdin, five alligators and a 5-month-old Bengal tiger named Kiara. Presently The Wild boasts that it is home to the largest big cat collection of any zoo in the state.

After watching the Netflix series focusing on big cat collectors, Taylor responded with his own takes.

“The characters in that movie do not represent the entire private sector. You’re putting the craziest people from the private sector on TV and they don’t represent our whole industry,” he said. “That’s what kind of sad about it.”

Taylor said he forced himself to watch it, bracing for the worst. He thought it would be a documentary, similar to “Black Fish," the 2013 documentary about a killer whale in captivity which had killed several people and aimed to uncover problems within the sea-park industry.

“It wasn’t that bad, but it still wasn’t good. I’m considered a private owner of big cats and a lot of times people think a private owner of a tiger is like a pet owner. I don’t think anybody should own a pet tiger,” Taylor said.

He has met some of the people featured in the docu-series, including Joe Exotic. Taylor said when he met Exotic years ago he was a very eccentric, nice guy who really cared about his animals. However, said he could see the progression over the past 10 years of how Exotic changed and he said, how Baskin changed him.

“He was always being attacked by her. She is the most guilty person. She attacked him first. He just became so wrapped up in trying to get back at her. She sued him, she sued his mother; she went after his whole life,” Taylor said.

Exotic is currently sentenced to 22 years in prison for several crimes, including a murder-for-hire plot and wildlife violations.

“Personally my opinion is that he was set up," Taylor said. “Jeff Lowe and that group, they basically set him up. I don’t think the government was innocent either. I think they all pushed him. For all the years he hated her, he never tried to do anything and then they set him up. I think he was vulnerable and people took advantage of him.”

Taylor does not agree with any sort of animal abuse, but didn’t know if Exotic ever abused his animals. He did say many of the people making claims of animal abuse are connected to supporting Lowe.

There is no character in the series however that draws more of Taylor’s ire than Carole Baskin.

He’s never met Baskin, but said she has gone after everyone in the industry who owns big cats. He said her big cat sanctuary is essentially run the same as a private zoo and describes it in a Facebook post as a “rusty small caged dump.”

“I’ve known she’s awful for years and years. It’s nice to finally have the world know it,” Taylor said.

If the Big Cat Safety Act that Baskin talks about in the series were to pass, he said it would essentially shut down zoos like The Wild. Taylor said the series was a poor representation of the private zoo sector. He said that for many the enclosures are just as nice as any city zoo and that the animals receive amazing care.

At The Wild, Taylor said they try to go above and beyond what the minimum requirements are in caring for the animals. They employ several zoo keepers and have on-call veterinarians which frequently come out to check on the animals.

Jeff Taylor, owner of The Wild Animal Park in Chittenango with one of his big cats.Provided photo | syracuse.com

“It’s very complicated, the whole radical animal rights movement,” Taylor said. “In essence, the whole movie comes down to money. It’s all based on a monopoly of trying to control the industry, to eliminate competition. Carole Baskin wants to be the only one. She’s a zoo basically and she doesn’t like that there are other zoos. The AZA also wants to eliminate zoos like mine because we’re competition. Anybody thinks it’s more than that just doesn’t know all the details along the way.”

The Wild is inspected and licensed by the United States Department of Agriculture and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and is required to follow the same regulations for feeding, housing and caring for animals as places like the Syracuse zoo. New York State also requires extra licensing to have big cats on exhibit at the zoo. Taylor said it is frustrating to constantly have to defend themselves against new legislation and he hopes the popularity of the movie doesn’t cause quick decisions that would be detrimental to zoos like his.

The zoo has retained all of its employees during the coronavirus pandemic shut down and is still preparing to open for a 2020 season, whenever that may be.

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