If you haven’t thought about Joe Exotic in a while, Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride are here to catch you up. The duo behind Tiger King, Chimp Crazy, and the new HBO series Monsters of God sit down with host Jackson Garrett on the latest VICE Culture Club, and within minutes it’s clear that the exotic animal world has continued being absolutely unhinged without any help from either of them.
On Joe: still in prison, still hustling, still trying to get Trump to pardon him. On Carole Baskin: sold Big Cat Rescue, apparently now a real estate mogul, and Goode isn’t exactly giving her the benefit of the doubt. “I think Carol may have gotten away with murder,” he says flatly, before moving on. Doc Antle served federal time for money laundering. Tanya Haddix, the chimp lady from Chimp Crazy, is incarcerated and apparently thriving — McBride keeps in touch via jail mail and reports she’s choreographing a Katy Perry number and working on a book. Everyone involved is exactly where you’d expect them to end up.
But the bulk of the conversation isn’t a Tiger King victory lap. Goode and McBride use Monsters of God, their dive into the global reptile trade, to get into who actually gets to own exotic animals and why. Fittingly, reptiles were where this whole run started. McBride says the opening scene of Tiger King was shot in a reptile shop before Joe Exotic and the big-cat crowd hijacked the project. Goode’s own history with reptiles includes a Southern Pacific rattlesnake bite that left him struggling to breathe and sick from the antivenom, which is one way to become very invested in the subject. Monsters of God brings them back to that original world, this time inside a guarded culture of collectors and a smuggling trade McBride describes as a multibillion-dollar industry.
Goode traces exotic animal ownership from the Rothschilds’ menageries to Pablo Escobar and cheetahs riding around the Middle East in Ferraris. Eventually, though, the status-symbol conversation runs into a more damning question. “What about the animal’s freedom?” he asks. “The cocaine isn’t suffering. The gun isn’t suffering. Animals have a life that we should care about.” He sees a big difference between a chimpanzee in someone’s basement and a desert tortoise living its life in an Arizona backyard, and he isn’t convinced every animal belongs in captivity simply because humans can put it there.
That same argument gets harder once the cage has a gift shop. Goode’s Turtle Conservancy holds the same accreditation as the Bronx Zoo, and he gives good zoos credit for saving threatened species. He also thinks a polar bear slowly turning green with fungus at the Singapore Zoo is pretty solid evidence that the whole system needs to change. “We all need to evolve in a quicker way,” he says.
The episode ends with a community rankings game. Biggest ego goes to tiger people — Goode’s words: “look at me, look at me — a little tiger attracts the chicks” — most dangerous neighbor is chimps, no debate, and best roommate in a crisis is monkey moms. Goode declines to play F/M/K. He has empathy for all of these communities and doesn’t want anyone going to prison. “I’m not the animal cop.”
His sign-off doubles as the argument he’s been making across all three series: “The real monsters in this story are us. So remember that — it’s not the reptiles.” Watch the full VICE Culture Club episode to hear Goode and McBride explain why the exotic animal world keeps producing the same cast of characters, and what they actually want to change.
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