Carole Baskin Spoke Out 'For The 1st Time Since Tiger King' Making 2 Big Cat Announcements

Even if you never got around to binging Netflix’s wildly popular docuseries Tiger King, you’ve probably heard all about the rivalry between Tampa’s Big Cat Rescue owner Carole Baskin and Joe Exotic, the former owner of G.W. Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma. Now, for the first time since the airing of Tiger King, Carole Baskin is finally breaking the silence with two announcements about the sanctuary.

In an email sent directly to Narcity, Baskin expressed her wish to clear up some fallacies that became evident to her after the docuseries went viral.

“I, Carole Baskin, speak out publicly for the first time since Tiger King,” the emails read. Baskin goes on to explain a new augmented reality game that she hopes will help end tiger captivity and the concerns of the public that led her to found it.

“Judging from the tens of thousands of calls, letters, emails and social posts I’ve gotten after Tiger King aired…most people don’t understand that breeding tigers is causing their extinction in the wild, not preventing it,” Baskin explained.

“Another fallacy that came into sharp focus was the general public’s belief that captive bred big cats can be set free.”  

The game launched Thursday, June 25, serendipitously the same day that Big Cat Rescue has been granted permanent possession of a tiger named Aria.

Aria was transferred to the sanctuary last year after being seized by the Ohio Department of Agriculture from a backyard as a private pet in Ohio.

“I felt if I was going to tell people there is a better way to educate people and make them care about conservation than keeping wild animals in cages, then I had to prove it,” Baskin wrote.

In partnering with Xennial Digital, the new free game was released for Rift users in the Oculus store, teaching players how to track a tiger in the wild while educating them on poaching and conservation efforts.

Baskin hopes that this type of augmented reality learning will help eliminate the need for the captivity of exotic animals.