I hate that I’m writing about this.

Netflix really wants me to watch Tiger King. With a stay home order in full effect, there’s not much left on Netflix that I want to watch and haven’t seen yet. I feel like if I haven’t watched Tiger King by now, it’s pretty unlikely that I’m going to. You’d think that after suggesting it to me about fifty times and having me pass every single time, the algorithm would take the hint, but the Netflix algorithm, for all its purported sophistication, is a blunt instrument.

It’s not the first time the algorithm has offended me. For one thing, it seems to think I speak every human language fluently, as it constantly suggests foreign films and TV shows. I like foreign films, but I also like to multitask, and that’s hard to do if I have to read subtitles. And there was that time when I watched one standup special and Netflix spent the next year trying to get me to watch the racist ventriloquism of Jeff Dunham. I watch one British comedy and suddenly it’s all tea and crumpets and ‘ello guv’na. I watched Six Feet Under and for the next two years the algorithm assumed I was gay. It has no sense of moderation or subtlety. It doesn’t get that when I watch one DIY show, that doesn’t mean I want to watch every DIY show, or only DIY shows. Even worse, when new episodes come out of something I actually do watch, the algorithm is so busy pushing shit on me that I don’t want to see, it doesn’t bother to let me know. And I get it — First World problems, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t seriously annoying.

Still, none of it sticks in my craw quite like Tiger King.

For Netflix, the timing couldn’t be better. They dropped a “documentary” about some seriously crazy shit, just as the entire world was told they had to stay home and find a way to entertain themselves. For a lot of people, the subject matter of Tiger King is entirely new and shocking. The characters are beyond colorful, and the stories are engaging. It’s no wonder the series is such a success.

For Carole Baskin, the timing couldn’t be worse. A sensationalized, highly suspect depiction of her life and work, that would have been damaging regardless of its release date, just happens to come out right when people have nothing else to do but stay home and watch it.

I don’t know Carole Baskin. We’ve never met in person. But I did have an email correspondence with her, years ago, while I was working on my master’s degree, I’ve been familiar with her work for a long time, and I won’t hold you in suspense — I do not believe for one second that she killed her husband. Furthermore, I think it’s despicable that the makers of Tiger King are suggesting that she did, it’s reckless of Netflix to air the series, and it’s disgusting that the show’s viewers, millions of them, have been so quick not only to believe in her guilt, but to turn the disappearance of a man suffering from severe dementia into such a big goddamn joke.

Before I moved to the Northwest I spent years volunteering at different big cat rescues. I’m very familiar with that whole world, the good and the bad. There’s nothing funny about any of it.

Before I go any further, if you’re on the ‘Carole Baskin is a murderer’ bandwagon, it’s only fair that you get her side of the story. I’m truly heartbroken that she felt the need to discuss such painful, personal subjects in a public medium, but you didn’t give her much choice.

If you’ve never been truly attacked via social media, you might not realize what Carole Baskin is going through right now. When I say attacked, I don’t mean having a disagreement with someone or being called out for a dumb thing you posted — I mean having a multi-pronged smear campaign run against you with the ultimate goal of ruining your life, or ending it. When you’re truly under attack, you get flooded with hate mail and death threats. People start showing up at your home, following you around town, photographing and filming you, your family, friends, and employees. People make false police reports against you. They write to every government agency they can and file false complaints. They flood every online review site with bad reviews, and if there’s a store where you shop a lot, or a restaurant where you like to eat, they go after them, too. They go on ancestry.com and look up every person you’re related to, and either threaten those people or try to turn them against you. They try to get your friends fired from their jobs. They stalk your children, or try to get CPS to take your kids from you. They attack every single facet of your life, every relationship you have, business or personal, and they have plenty of time to do it, because the people who do this shit usually don’t have jobs; most of them are completely unemployable. If you ever spent ten minutes with them in person you’d realize that something was deeply wrong, but over the Internet they seem almost sane. Some of them do this shit out of pure hatefulness, or for the power trip. Others do it to get famous, or to log some ‘activism’ that they can put on their résumés. And make no mistake — they won’t be satisfied until you’re in prison or dead, either by suicide or by the hand of some lunatic who ‘joined the cause’.

Yeah, I’ve been through it. Carole Baskin is going through it right now. If she can ride out the storm and keep her organization’s funding intact, she might survive.

It seems to me there are two, major accusations being hurled at Carole. There will be more, because that’s the way it goes, but right now, it’s this: 1. Carole Baskin is a murderer; 2. Carole Baskin is bad because she has wild cats in cages. I’ll take these one at a time.

Carole Baskin is a murderer: What’s the actual evidence? Carole does a pretty good job on her website of debunking the so-called evidence against her, so I’m not going to get into it all here, but I will say this: you don’t need a bunch of tigers to get rid of a body. There are, in fact, so many ways to get rid of a body that it truly makes no more sense to suspect someone of murder for having access to big cats than for having access to a boat or a shovel. Feeding a body to tigers isn’t even a good way to dispose of it, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which are their tendency to bury uneaten bits of food, and the ability of lab technicians to pull DNA from stomach contents and feces.

I’d also like to point out that while Carole doesn’t actually have an industrial meat grinder like the one shown in Tiger King, I do. I have a five horsepower, three-phase electric Butcher Boy meat grinder, and guess what — it doesn’t grind bones, human or animal. You can put smaller poultry bones through it, but even those will jam it up from time to time. The machine is made for grinding small chunks of meat, fat, and other soft tissues; I can’t imagine trying to put a human body through it. (Especially not when I have a bandsaw that cuts through bones like butter…)

What I’m saying is that the accusation of murder is stupid. Which is more likely, that a woman killed her husband and undertook an elaborate and totally unrealistic, labor-intensive, B-horror movie process to hide his body, or that the guy disappeared in Costa Rica? Have you been to Costa Rica? The place is practically run by organized crime. People sell cocaine on the sidewalk in front of the police station in Jaco. Cosa Nostra and Colombian cartels are everywhere, and there are also thousands of square miles of jungle, with plenty of crocodiles, venomous snakes, and tropical diseases. It’s my kind of place, but it’s also a place where there are countless ways for a shady guy with dementia to disappear, many of them not even requiring foul play.

Carole Baskin is bad because she has wild cats in cages: This is where people’s lazy ignorance becomes very apparent. Carole has been campaigning for decades against keeping wild cats in captivity, trying to work herself out of a job. She’s not saying, ‘This is OK for me, but not for you,’ she’s saying, ‘If other people didn’t keep these animals in abusive captive conditions, I could close my sanctuary.’ If you can’t tell the difference between a shitty roadside zoo and an accredited animal sanctuary, you’re probably beyond help. Roadside zoos torture and kill animals while producing a constant stream of ‘cute’ babies to draw in the public and get as much of their money as possible. Sanctuaries exist to save animals from that awful life. Equating the two is like saying puppy mills and no-kill animal shelters are the same thing.

Of course, some of you believe the cats should be released into the wild. Quick, no googling allowed, what continent do wild tigers live on? If you still think your head’s not up your ass, proceed.

There are a lot of reasons these animals can’t be released into the wild, but allow me to list some of the main ones.

1. It’s fucking illegal. You cannot legally release captive animals into the wild unless they are part of an official captive breeding and release program, and none of these animals are. For one thing, they’re almost all ‘mutts’, by which I mean they are of mixes of different subspecies, as opposed to being pure Siberian, Bengal, or Sumatran tigers. Even if you could get through the export-import process, releasing them would pollute the wild gene pool, assuming they ever had the chance to reproduce, which they wouldn’t, because…

2. They would fucking die. Many of these animals are elderly or have health problems that would preclude them from release, but even if they’re perfectly healthy, they don’t know how to hunt. Sure, they could be taught, and most would probably figure it out on their own, if they weren’t immediately killed by the more experienced cats already living in the area. Of course, there’s no telling what they would hunt, and you can rest assured that if they somehow managed to survive…

3. They would fucking kill people. Most of these animals aren’t afraid of people, and they associate people with food. They also weigh hundreds of pounds and are capable of killing a person by accident. Do the fucking math. And oh, another thing…

4. They’re fucking declawed. Not all of them, but a shocking number of captive tigers, lions, leopards, etc. are. The procedure is the same as the one used on house cats — the distal phalanx is surgically removed from each digit, or in some cases a tendon is cut so that the claws are still there, but can’t be used. These procedures have adverse side effects for the cats, but the main one is that they can’t hunt or defend themselves. Get it? Also…

5. Where the fuck would they even go? There are thousands more tigers in captivity than there are in the wild, and habitat is disappearing at an alarming rate. Any habitat that’s suitable for big cats already has big cats in it. Even if these animals could be safely and ethically released into the wild, which they can’t — even if they wouldn’t walk right up to a poacher and get shot — there’s no wild for them to be released into.

And oh, by the way, there’s no room for them at accredited zoos, either, not to mention those places aren’t what you probably think they are.

Hope that helps.

If you want to understand animal rescue people — the good ones, who do good work — it’s really not that hard. Here’s what they all have in common:

1.They’re all a little weird or they wouldn’t have gotten into this kind of work, but don’t mistake weird for crazy, even if they jokingly tell you they’re crazy. Eccentric and mentally ill are not the same thing.

2.They got into this to help animals, and instead they have to spend a huge amount of time working with people, whether it’s fundraising, managing staff and volunteers, coordinating rescue efforts, or dealing with pencil pushers and law enforcement. This isn’t what they thought they would be doing when they started out, and it sucks.

3.They have to answer the same questions, explain the same things, repeat the same stories, over and over again, day after day, year after year, and it’s exhausting.

4.They’re not getting the support they need, financially, emotionally, or with boots on the ground, and they’re burned out.

5.They’re under a microscope, because animal rescue is one of the few fields on earth where accidents and mistakes are never tolerated. Their own people, their donors, the cops, and any number of animal protection groups are ready to pounce the first time they screw up.

6.Sometimes they have to do some goofy shit to raise money.

7.They are suspicious of everyone, because they’ve been stabbed in the back more times than they can remember. People constantly lie to them and manipulate them.

8.They tend to think no one else can do the work they’re doing, because they’ve seen so much incompetence, it’s hard to remember that there’s anything else.

9.They carry with them every day the knowledge that if they fail, the animals die, and they carry the painful memory of every animal they’ve lost. Think about when your dog died and how devastated you were. Now imagine going through that hundreds of times over the course of your career. It’s fucking brutal at best.

10.They still love what they do and don’t want to do anything else.

The best way I can sum it up is to say that they do a difficult, thankless job that almost everyone on the outside thinks is easy and fun, and has no interest in hearing otherwise. Imagine what that’s like the next time you feel like shitting on someone.

I’ve also heard the argument that if Tiger King was such a bunch of sensationalized bullshit, Netflix wouldn’t have aired it. Surely there’s some threshold for credibility that had to be met. It wouldn’t be on TV if it wasn’t true. Oh, you stupid, stupid moron. Clearly you’ve never worked in film or television.

If you’re a documentarian, it’s certainly considered bad form to misrepresent your project to your subjects, but it’s not at all unheard of, nor is it especially unusual for filmmakers to use some creative editing to tell whatever story they want to tell. Sometimes megastar filmmakers get caught pulling this shit; Michael Moore leaps to mind.

Even reporters, who are supposed to be objective, do this more often than you would think. I remember an interview with one hack reporter who had written, ahead of time, a specific quote that he wanted me to say, and he repeatedly tried to force me to say it. “Would you say _____?” “No, I wouldn’t put it that way.” “So you would say _____?” “That’s the same thing I just told you I wouldn’t say.” “Then would you say_____?” “I’m not going to say it, and if you don’t stop trying to get me to say it, this interview is over.” Except it actually went on much longer, if you can believe that; I called his editor and told him to be sure I never had to speak to the moron again. But he’s not the only reporter I’ve had play that game, or try to threaten me into going on the record, or refuse to take a statement from me if I didn’t grant a full interview and meet his other terms. ‘I won’t tell your side of the story unless you do XYZ.’ And that was the supposedly objective, professional, news media, not the throngs of shit-bloggers clamoring to be discovered by a legitimate media outlet. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, chances are you’ve come to distrust the news, but you trust fucking Netflix fucking Tiger King?

Netflix isn’t a news outlet, and they’re not interested in shining a light in the darkness. Netflix cares about one thing — how many people watch. They have some minimal standards for their content, which appear to be: 1. No porno, and 2. It would be nice if we didn’t get sued. I’ll be very surprised if Carole Baskin doesn’t sue them. I hope she does, I hope she wins, and I hope those cats are set for life.

And if you’re still on the bandwagon, you can keep denying any responsibility for your part in attacking Carole Baskin. You can say you’re just along for the ride; maybe it’ll go off a cliff.