Carole Baskin of Tiger King fame is pissed off at the new ‘WAP’ video by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion for their use of big cats throughout the clip.
The CEO of Big Cat Rescue, who played the role of antagonist to Joe Exotic in the hugely popular Netflix doco Tiger King, believes that the use of cats as props in the video clip may “glamorize” the notion of having them as pets.
The ‘WAP’ video contains several scenes where the two rappers are wearing various tiger-style prints, with photoshopped big cats wandering around in the background.
Baskin told Billboard she’s worried that most people won’t realise the clearly-photoshopped cats are photoshopped. “My guess is that most people won’t even see the Photoshopped cats in the scenes because the rest of it is so lurid,” she said.
“I was happy to see that it does appear to all be Photoshopped. It didn’t look like the cats were really in the rooms with the singers. In fact, probably most of the rooms were Photoshopped in via green screen.”
Yeah, no duh!
She went on to criticise the very act of using footage of tigers and cheetahs at all, because it would have been filmed in front of a green screen which “doesn’t happen in the wild.
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“It can’t happen in sanctuaries like ours where cats have plenty of room to avoid a green screen (or would shred it if offered access and could die from ingesting it),” Baskin said.
“That tells me they probably dealt with one of the big cat pimps, who makes a living from beating, shocking and starving cats to make them stand on cue in front of a green screen in a studio. That’s never good for the cat.”
“The worst part is that it glamorizes the idea of rich people having tigers as pets.”
Tiger King has been such a massive cultural phenomenon in 2020 that The Offspring even covered the song ‘Here Kitty Kitty’ from the doco.