Netflix’s new limited series Tiger King introduced the world to Joe Exotic, a Midwestern big cat owner who is gaining notoriety for his eccentricities and crimes — but Tiger King doesn’t show Joe Exotic’s craziest experiment: trying to breed a sabertooth tiger. As one of Netflix’s newest true crime documentary series, Tiger King is a new pop culture fad, joining the likes of Making a Murderer and Wild Wild Country. At its center is Joe Exotic, the one-time owner of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Wynnewood, Oklahoma. Among the many shady characters in Tiger King, Joe Exotic has become a nationwide fascination, despite the documentary omitting one of his wildest schemes.
Most of Tiger King focuses on the friction between breeders like Joe Exotic and big cat rescuers, including Joe Exotic’s nemesis in the cat world, Carole Baskin. While his alleged murder plot against Baskin is the central drama of Tiger King, Joe Exotic’s personal history is just as fascinating. Though he began his zoo with the intention of educating visitors about the dangers of private big cat breeding, greed got the better of Joe. He began to breed tiger cubs that he could then charge his visitors to interact with.
According to Intelligencer, after his cub breeding program began, Joe set his sights on the biggest of the big cats. While visiting another zoo in 2003, Joe Exotic had his first experience with a liger — the result of breeding a tiger and a lion. Ligers can grow much larger than either parent species, a sure draw for crowds. Joe wouldn’t settle for anything so simple, though. He wanted something even more alluring, a cat that no one else in the world possessed. Despite scientists’ assertions that it is biologically impossible to do so, Joe wanted to breed a sabertooth tiger.
Joe Exotic’s sabertooth plan is worthy of its own Tiger King sequel. He bred the liger mentioned above with another lion, thus creating a "liliger." Joe continued this practice until his animals were gargantuan in size. It seems that Joe believed this process of breeding would result in the resurrecting the ultimate tiger king. There are a lot of problems with Joe’s logic, including the fact that sabertooth cats are genetically far removed from the big cats alive today. In addition, ligers were thought to be sterile until recently, because the interbreeding of these species promotes several biological issues for the offspring.
Tiger King’s Joe Exotic exhibits unpredictable, misguided behavior. It’s clear from Tiger King that Joe puts his own need for attention before the health and safety of his animals; apparently, that pattern started long before his feud with Carole Baskin turned violent. Joe Exotic fancies himself an animal lover, but his experiments to produce a sabertooth tiger through continued private breeding show that his purported wisdom comes from a place not of science or environmentalism. Rather, as shown through his failed sabertooth experiment, Joe Exotic operates purely from self-interest and ignorance — which makes him the most fascinating character in Tiger King.