In early 2014, Cracked was just beginning to launch its Personal Experiences arm, and I was a bright-eyed bushy-tailed 21 year old intern here. An early assignment of mine was an article pitch about what it was like to take care of exotic animals on American soil. It doesn't take a genius detective or the Spotlight crew to know that it's a super shady industry, but I wanted to start by talking to someone whose operation was above ground to get a feel for what it was like to actually take care of animals like lions and tigers.

The main interview I conducted was with a lady named Carole Baskin, who runs a place called Big Cat Rescue down in Tampa, Florida. If you're really interested, you can watch the interview I'm conducting from my childhood bedroom while on summer vacation from college (peep the baseball wallpaper I got when I was like nine years old), because unbeknownst to me, she recorded it and uploaded it to YouTube.

No harm, no foul on the upload. It's not a super long interview (many of our Personal Experience interviews took hours), and I refuse to watch this video because look at my stupid baby face, but the description of the video indicates she's aware that we didn't run anything based on the interview. That is true. For numerous reasons, not the least of which is that I was a 21 year old intern who didn't have a great grip on this whole "journalism" thing yet, we didn't run an article about exotic animals in the United States, but I sure did want to (I'll get to that in a minute).

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I attempted to interview people besides Carole Baskin as well. Of my own accord, about a year or so after the interview with Carole, I toured a place called the Exotic Feline Rescue Center near Terre Haute, Indiana, about a 90 minute drive away from my apartment at the time, and had a chance to speak briefly with owner Joe Taft and a tour guide named Sophie. They follow many of the same safety rules and commit to largely the same mission there as Carole Baskin does, and they'd been interviewed by Vice just the past year.

Meanwhile, our interview coordinator at Cracked attempted to contact someone else for me to talk to -- a gay, gun-toting, mullet-haired tiger breeder out of Oklahoma, and if that description doesn't scream "2013 Cracked," I don't know what does. That guy was Joe Exotic, and through "his people," he declined an interview. Thank God he did, that interview would've gone south in seconds and scared the cat pee out of my fragile little intern brain.

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Fast forward to just a couple weeks ago, and YouTube shows me a trailer for a new Netflix series called "Tiger King," and as I watched the personalities this show was trotting out, my jaw hit the f@$%ing floor. It was Carole Baskin and Joe Exotic. I'd been asking Carole questions about caring for cats and stopping the big cat trade, when what I should've been asking was, "Hey, are there people who want to kill you, and what's their problem?"

I binged Tiger King about as fast as I could, and man, is it a hard look at that whole exotic cat trade industry. Carole Baskin was nothing but kind and helpful to me as a dumb little 21 year old intern through that interview and follow-up emails, and I have to say the documentary makes her look like the polar opposite of the woman I talked to. I learned quite a bit from her, and even though there wasn't quite enough content to run a full feature about the subject five or six years ago, I think it's certainly worth briefly going over some of the key things I learned from her here that Tiger King, stunningly, didn't have time for.