CNN Interviews Carole Baskin About Loose Tiger in Texas Linked to Murder Suspect: ‘People Who Own Tigers are Really Dangerous’
There was a certain hilarious irony on Wednesday morning when Carole Baskin, famously featured in the Netflix docu-series Tiger King, appeared on CNN to talk about the tiger on the loose in Houston, TX.
CNN’s New Day used part of their morning to cover the arrest of Victor Cuevas earlier this week after he evading the police amid charges of suspected murder. One of the weirdest things surrounding the Cuevas case though is that he has been connected to a recent incident where a tiger was seen roaming around Houston before someone, possibly Cuevas, loaded the cat into a pickup truck and drove off with it. The tiger is currently unaccounted for.
When John Berman asked Baskin for her thoughts about the whole situation, she said that “this has become kind of commonplace in Texas.” She also hypothesized that the tiger was an aged-out “pay to play prop,” which is when exotic animals are taken away from their mothers at a young age, placed in captivity, and taken to places where people can pay a fee to play or interact with them.
“I’m extremely worried about what happens with this tiger and the people around it,” Baskin said. “The people who were involved in buying and selling and owning and transporting this tiger have proven they’re absolutely reckless individuals with no concern for the people around them, or for the animal involved. No tiger belongs in a backyard or basement.”
Baskin went on to say that the video of the tiger shows there was an extremely dangerous situation in Houston with it being able to roam free. As Baskin called for the passing of the Big Cat Safety Act in order to forbid people from owning tigers as pets, Berman asked her to address the obvious question of “why shouldn’t you have a grown tiger in your house?”
Her answer:
Tigers are hard-wired to roam hundreds of square miles. So there’s no cage that’s going to be sufficient for them. And the only reason that people have tigers as pets is to try to show off to others that they are more powerful than the most powerful creature on the planet. That already tells you that the kind of people who own tigers are really dangerous, reckless people.
Watch above, via CNN.
