Curious about Doc Antle from Netflix's new Tiger King docuseries? Read our 2015 feature where we went inside his organization T.I.G.E.R.S. to find out what really goes on
Animal friendships are not the only heartstring-tugging image that comes out of T.I.G.E.R.S. The place bills itself as offering “the greatest hands-on animal experience in the world.” Its core business is housing people-friendly lions and tigers, and selling pictures of customers holding their cubs. Tours, offered three times a week during the summer, cost $339 per person; professional photos start at $150 . That’s a lot more expensive than a zoo.
Surrounding me is a crowd of about 70: mostly middle-aged adults, a few kids and a smattering of retirees. In the safari-themed lodge, half a dozen TVs play videos on a loop of, among other things, Antle’s six appearances onand Britney Spears performing at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards in front of a big cat. Behind her, holding its leash, is Antle. “We worked with Eddie Murphy onOur tour guides for today are Mari and Moksha, two bubbly young women decked out in animal print and heavy makeup.
Antle’s isn’t the only U.S. park that offers cub petting – by the Humane Society’s count, as many as 80 others have operated in the last five years – but it is the largest and most sophisticated. T.I.G.E.R.S. also operates a satellite storefront at an outdoor mall in Myrtle Beach that sells cub photos every summer evening, and a smaller facility in Miami that performs a big cat show at the Jungle Island amusement park.
Overlooking the wooden ring where T.I.G.E.R.S. guests play with the animals is a large digital clock with numbers glowing in red. The clock is reset when the cubs come out. When it reads 20 minutes, trainers take the furry bundles back to their enclosures. “That’s the whole game for the exploiting of cubs,” Antle tells me later. “It’s really incredibly minimal. The naysayers think that we have hundreds of tiger cubs, which is just insane.
Of course, when a bunch of young, single, attractive people work together, relationships form. Rob lives with Mari, the other tour guide. I hear Antle refer to one of the longtime staff members, Rajani Ferrante, as “my little Italian girlfriend.” He describes a departed staffer as having been “one of my lovely girlfriends for a long time, and then she wasn’t.” Antle and I spend a lot of time during my visit with Moksha, and they seem very close.
He’s been doing some form of that ever since, taking cats to renaissance fairs, carnivals, malls, conventions, anywhere with a crowd. But in the early years, he says, he never realized the full range of photo opportunities around him. “I could kick myself for a hundred incredible stories that I missed,” he says.
Harrison came back to Ohio and gave all his exotic animals away to sanctuaries. He didn’t want to be a warden for captives, and didn’t want to support what he now saw as the noxious trade in wild pets. In 1991, Harrison founded, a small sanctuary that only accepts animals if owners swear off keeping exotic pets. He looks at the estimate of 5,000 captive tigers in the U.S. and says that, if anything, it’s low.
Still, Antle admits that he has given cats to parks that have no accreditation at all, like Tiger Safari in Oklahoma, where Sarabi ended up. “I’ve got places that aren’t ZAA-accredited that have taken some of my animals, and they may be controversial, but the habitats, the places they’re keeping them, the food, the veterinary care is all high-end stuff, and they also must have years and years of experience.
Suryia and Roscoe became the best-known animal friendship at T.I.G.E.R.S. – on the tour, staff members hand guests a glossy booklet entitled “Animal Friendships of the Myrtle Beach Safari,” with the pair on the cover. Antle contracted with a publishing company to release a children’s book about the two of them. They appeared on Oprah. He claims that a video of them shot for National Geographic Channel has been watched 95 million times, although this is difficult to verify. T.I.G.E.R.S.
But on my final day in Myrtle Beach, amidst all the reveries and cute photos, one animal experience made me wary. A photographer came to take a portrait of Antle for this story. Before even setting up the shoot, we’d had to negotiate what could be pictured. “Can’t shoot cages,” he told us. “If you do chain link, it’ll look like we’re shooting pictures in a prison.” He was uncertain about letting an outside photographer come at all.
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