*Article Tiger King* **and the Exegesis of COVID-19 Media Coverage of Nonhuman Animals**

**Claudia Alonso-Recarte**

Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, Universitat de València, 46010 Valencia, Spain; Claudia.Alonso@uv.es

**Abstract:** Beginning with the premise that the media participates in the manufacturing of the societal consent that enables and perpetuates the systematized exploitation of nonhuman animals, this article explores how media coverage of such nonhuman animals (and of wildlife in particular) during the COVID-19 crisis may influence our consumption of popular entertainment in a way that centralizes the discussion on the implications of established speciesist practices. I specifically focus on the impact of the first season of Netflix's successful docuseries *Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness*, directed by Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, which was released in March 2020, a key moment in the worldwide management of the pandemic. *Tiger King* has generated significant controversy because of its languid commitment to a solid conservationist message and to the paradigm of animal advocacy documentaries. However, understanding how and why nonhuman animals were considered newsworthy by COVID-19 media provides us with some interpretative keys through which to reapproach the significance of the show. Analyzing the series' main themes and motifs in light of the media's narratives on lockdown, wildlife, and human interference over nature allows us to continue exploring methodologies through which to question the multiple anthropocentric discourses that structure and order societal consent to the existence of zoos.

**Keywords:** *Tiger King*; COVID-19 media; popular culture; zoos; quarantine; captive wildlife

#### **1. Introduction**

In 2020, as human societies worldwide shut themselves in their homes following governmental recommendations or obligations to decelerate the spread of coronavirus, the media voraciously dove into the exploration of the many stories that could compound an overall sociocultural narrative of the health crisis. In this unprecedented global scenario in the age of modern technology and communication, nonhuman animals gravitated towards the center of media attention in order to address the anxieties, uncertainties, and excess of information and misinformation surrounding the pandemic. This paper explores how discourses, meanings, and connotations associated with nonhuman animals during the pandemic may have influenced audience perceptions on wildlife1 in Netflix's hit sevenepisode docuseries *Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness*, directed by Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin. The first season of *Tiger King* was released in March 2020, coinciding with the beginning of lockdown in the United States and around the world, and would become one of the most viral, binge-watched shows during quarantine, with dozens of millions of viewers in only the first month. The documentary, which was intrinsically problematic in terms of its treatment of captivity narratives, seemed structurally torn between an unapologetic absorption of formulaic entertainment and an alleged conservationist agenda. However, the pop culture phenomenon that it became, I argue, should not preclude its historization within a highly convulsed era in which coronavirus was redefining human interactions and spatial encounters with nonhuman animal others. The massive popularity of *Tiger King* during as extraordinary a time as the pandemic begs the question as to whether

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**Citation:** Alonso-Recarte, Claudia. 2022. *Tiger King* and the Exegesis of COVID-19 Media Coverage of Nonhuman Animals. *Journalism and Media* 3: 99–114. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/journalmedia3010008

Academic Editors: Carrie P. Freeman and Núria Almiron

Received: 10 December 2021 Accepted: 10 January 2022 Published: 20 January 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

such new ways of looking at animal otherness, wildlife, and the spaces they occupy invite alternative "readings" of the series' representation of the decadent American zoo culture and of the threat of extinction.

#### **2. The Anthropocentric (In)visibility of Nonhuman Animals**

The exegesis of documentaries is irreparably bound to the historical context and cultural zeitgeist from which they emerged and into which they are released. *Tiger King* was five years in the making, and so the type of environmental concerns with wildlife that the show reflected (or, as some critics would argue, sidestepped) answered to pre-COVID anxieties and sensibilities. By the late 2010s, climate change, accelerated loss of biodiversity, the threat of contaminants such as plastics, the depletion of oceanic ecosystems, and the overall umbrella concept of the Anthropocene had permeated public discussions and entered many countries' national and international political agendas for compromise. The extent to which the media was effective in leading to action to counteract problems of such magnitude, however, remains questionable. What seems clear is that a narrative pattern had been shaping; one in which discourses of extinction were authenticated through scientific authority and often expressed with overwhelming lists of threatened ecosystems and ecological disasters:

Indeed, the 2010s mark the decade when the impacts from climate change became unmistakable, at least for any objective-minded observer. As temperatures rose, Arctic sea ice melted far faster than models had predicted. The world's coral reefs suffered widespread and devastating bleaching events. And regions around the world grappled with some of the costliest, deadliest, and most extreme droughts, hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires in recorded history. (Temple 2019, para. 21)

Despite pre-COVID-19 public discussions on global warming, mainstream journalistic connections between the ecological crisis and the systemic unethical treatment of nonhuman animal others had been disproportionally scant. After all, media and communication have been instrumental in the manufacturing of societal consent for the industrialized and systematized abuse of nonhuman others (Almiron 2016, p. 27), and what little attention the media did pay to animal abuse tended "to support, rather than challenge, hegemonic speciesism in a number of ways" (Taylor 2016, p. 42). As Spiehler and Fischer add, "the public isn't very concerned about the plight of animals—or is concerned, but has a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance" (Spiehler and Fischer 2021, p. 2). The invisibility of nonhuman animals in capitalist systems has been long noted by John Berger (Berger [1980] 2009) and Carol Adams (Adams [1990] 2015): the former famously discussed how nonhuman animals have been surrogated by the consumable, cultural representations that we have of them, while the latter theorized about the piecing of their bodies into edible fragments, rendering the actual nonhuman animal, the "absent referent", unworthy of visibility or moral consideration. The normalization of mass consumption of nonhuman others has been further validated by media practices that both dictate and naturalize their conception as commodities to be objectified or commercialized with.

Certain types of narratives that deal with nonhuman otherness bear a complex connection to the manufacturing of consent. Such is the case of documentary films. Wildlife documentaries, for instance, have a long history of nonhuman animal advocacy in television culture and have sparked all sorts of discussions pertaining to the ethics of wildlife representation (Bousé 2000; Chris 2006; Horak 2006; Mills 2010, 2012, 2017; Mitman 2009). In basic terms, these films are characterized by the representation of wild animals in their habitats with minimal human intervention, with the object of reflecting "natural" instincts and behaviors. The genre, however, has been exposed on a number of occasions for its manipulation of the time and spaces in which the represented nonhuman animals function. In addition, the genre's claims of advocacy must be contrasted with the use of a rhetoric and technique that, on the other hand, strengthen the collective consent to objectify nonhuman animals. Wildlife documentaries' overt reflections of mainstream ideology (Chris 2006, p. xix) and heteronormativity and monogamy (Mills 2012) function under a consensual assimilation of anthropomorphism that informs our own human cultures, frequently disregarding the factors and findings that may justify the conceptualization of nonhuman animals as sentient subjects worthy of moral consideration.

*Tiger King*, in any event, does not qualify as a wildlife documentary per se, and as we will see, its intrinsic connections to nonhuman animal advocacy documentaries are fragile. In the twenty-first century, partly as a response to the growing awareness of the perils of the Anthropocene and the need for a market to refer to these issues, there has been a notable increase in the production of these so-called animal advocacy (or even activist) documentary films that have countered mainstream media's manufactured consent of nonhuman animal exploitation. Ranging from more welfarist to more deontological approaches, or even treating animal protection as primarily beneficial to human interests, these documentaries have resorted to methods such as undercover footage, strategic use of authority figures, and the sensuous, raw representation of nonhuman animal suffering in the hands of humans and their industries through visuals and soundscapes. As Loy states, "[b]y engaging strategically and meaningfully in this public discourse [on nonhuman animal exploitation], advocates can help alter the anthropocentric paradigm of our times and lay the foundation for the transition to a more eco-centric model" (Loy 2016, p. 221). Among the many titles, we may find documentaries imploding agriculture, farming, and the food industry and exposing myths about proper nutrition (*Super Size Me* (Spurlock 2004); *Food, Inc.* (Kenner 2008); *Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret* (Andersen and Kuhn 2014); *Lucent* (Delforce 2014); *The Game Changers* (Psihoyos 2018)). There are also documentaries such as *Earthlings* (Monson 2005) and *Dominion* (Delforce 2018) that construct their shock tactics with the accumulation of footage of wanton cruelty and abuse in a number of industries (food, clothing, entertainment, tourism, the pharmaceutical and medical research industries, etc.). Others build their criticism against such industries by focusing on the individuality of one particular victim or species. Coperthwaite's *Blackfish* (Coperthwaite 2013) and Marsh's *Project Nim* (Marsh and ir 2011), for instance, respectively articulate anticaptivity messages through the tragic stories of a Sea World orca and a chimpanzee used for research in language and grammar acquisition. Schatz's short film *An Apology to Elephants* (Schatz 2013) depicts the history of the exploitation of elephants in the entertainment industry, and Psihoyos's award-winning *The Cove* (Psihoyos 2009) portrays the massacre of scores of dolphin pods in Taiji, Japan. Other films are case studies of the destruction of particular habitats and the massive disappearance of wildlife (*Virunga* (von Einsiedel 2014); *Seaspiracy* (Tabrizi 2021)), and others focus on the work of acknowledged activists (such as Jo-Anne McArthur in Marshall's *The Ghosts in Our Machine* (Marshall 2013)) and their criminalization (*Your Mommy Kills Animals* (Johnson 2007); *The Animal People* (Hennelly and Suchan 2019)). Yet others focus on emphasizing the interspecies similarities with humans, depicting the legal conundrum (*Unlocking the Cage* (Hegedus and Pennebaker 2016)), or the act of "becoming" the nonhuman animal other and being invited into "their" world (*My Octopus Teacher* (Ehrlich and Reed 2020)). These are just part of a shortlist of productions that aim to educationally shatter our active and our passive involvement in the manufacturing of consent. As Claire Parkinson [Claire Molloy] contends in her landmark study *Popular Media and Animals*, "not all news media representations trivialize animals. Public interest in conservation, animal welfare, animal rights, ethics and the environment has prompted the inclusion of animal stories that blur the line between soft and hard news in newspapers and television" (Molloy 2011, p. 7). Whether *Tiger King* merits being categorized as an animal advocacy documentary is a reasonable debate that will be further explored throughout this paper. For now, it is suffice to say that its reception must be regarded from the point of view of how it compares to the narratives purported in these types of films.

In addition, beyond observations as to the structure and genre of the series and how these might strengthen or challenge the manufacturing of societal consent, what this paper seeks is to understand how media discourses and stories on nonhuman animal otherness during the pandemic may have filtered themselves into the *Tiger King* narrative, offering metaphors and interpretations that the creators of the show could not have anticipated. The anthropocentric urgency of the pandemic, with its fundamental focus on saving human lives, in many ways pushed the discourse of a perishing world to the forefront, rendering evident how the mismanagement and destruction of the environment had caused the outbreak of the virus. In their study on the UK's leading media coverage of nonhuman animals as COVID-19 vectors, Hooper et al. refer to these as the "it's our fault" narratives, based on "a presumptive concern about the human role in dramatically affecting the lives of animals in the wild through an emphasis on littering, the human spread into traditionally understood animal spaces, or a broader concern about the environmental impact of the pandemic" (Hooper et al. 2021, p. 12). These types of "we-brought-this-on-ourselves" patterns became part of the scaffold of the narratives that were to define the global health crisis, providing it with a set of images and an identity that could in time consolidate a historiographic record of the period. To focus on the health of the planet was in the interest of self-preservation first, and so mainstream media's manufacturing of consent when it came to the exploitation of nonhuman animals remained for the most part intact at its core. What did change in the media's coverage of nonhuman animals was the reason why they were newsworthy enough to figure in different types of stories and headlines that compounded the sociocultural narratives of the crisis. Long accustomed to a cultural apparatus of modernity in which they have '"disappeared" and have been replaced by commodified consumables (Berger [1980] 2009), nonhuman animal bodies became, in a way, a very "real" thing—one with very real consequences.

By claiming that the media's coverage of nonhuman animals since the beginning of the pandemic has made them more "visible", I do not mean to convey that this has been to favor their consideration as sentient beings: although some progress may have been made in this regard, the overall focus on anthropocentric interests, as mentioned above, mostly overpowered arguments that called for a cautionary protection of the environment and management of natural resources for the sake of the nonhuman animals themselves. What I mean is that, although the media presupposes representation in and of itself, the nonhuman animals that were covered by these reports were done so on the basis of their biological significance precisely because their bodies, their physiologies, and how humans process them and make them consumable commodities had direct consequences over human health. The "absent referents" that were made visible by the media were not sentient nonhuman animals with complex subjectivities—they were embodied liabilities that had to be properly monitored and manufactured to avoid grand-scale risks for humans. In the words of environmental and business historian Joshua Specht,

COVID-19 is a reminder of our embeddedness in the animal world. Despite the conceptual boundaries we draw between human and nonhuman, we are in intimate contact with animals everywhere in the world ... Animals make our world, whether visible or not. And sometimes that centrality has fundamental consequences. (Way et al. 2020, p. 468)

Spiehler and Fischer argue that indirect animal rights activism that focused either on wet markets in particular or on the larger, transnational issue of intensive farming ran the risk of ultimately backfiring and servicing corporative monopolization of nonhuman animal agriculture, as well as of fueling racist rhetoric, however unintentionally. Beyond the validation or counterclaims to their discussion, what I would like to draw attention to is the fact that indirect forms of activism have been, it seems, rather prevalent throughout the pandemic. By indirect activism, Spiehler and Fischer refer to forms of activism that appeal to public interests but that are designed to accommodate the activist's primary agenda—to abolish nonhuman animal exploitation:

[I]t's indirect in the sense that the issue that's supposed to 'hook' the audience isn't the one that's the primary motivation for the activism, even if it's an issue about which the activist is genuinely concerned; instead, it's an issue she hopes to use to motivate others to act in ways that fit with her primary objective. (Spiehler and Fischer 2021, p. 2)

The very need to resort to indirect activism is a confirmation of the extent to which anthropocentric concerns underlie the damage control of the pandemic. In other words, despite the fact that nonhuman animals gain prominence in COVID-19 narratives, it does not mean that their presence indicates a shift regarding their moral consideration. As advocates employing indirect forms of activism suggest, according to Spiehler and Fischer, the public's primary concern is with food safety and the effects of zoonotic diseases on humans, not with nonhuman animal suffering or environmental degradation. Mainstream COVID-19 media, therefore, catapulted nonhuman animals as embodiments that were newsworthy insofar as they were evidence of human self-sabotage. As Yin et al. ascertain, "[w]hile humans and animals were simultaneously harmed by COVID-19, ethical concerns for human suffering were prioritized" (Yin et al. 2021, p. 1426).

In what I hope to be a fruitful gesture, what I intend to convey in this study is that for all the anthropocentric interests that motor COVID-19 media stories on nonhuman animals, we may still reappropriate our roles as consumers and interpreters and find exegetical paths through which to make eco-centric concerns viable. In other words, being a responsible consumer of media coverage involves being an active critic, not a passive recipient, and in that exercise of responsibility we would do well to make room for the study of how media discourses can potentially absorb narratives in which anthropocentric and nonhuman-animal-centered issues can coexist and converge. The focus on *Tiger King* is particularly strategic in this regard because examining its structural narratives and audiovisual rhetoric against the backdrop of COVID-19 media is not just an active stand against the purism of anthropocentrism, but also against the viral, mainstream reception of a show that all-too-clearly spreads the comfort zone of collective manufactured consent. By contextualizing the docuseries in the wider discursive frameworks of COVID-19 media coverage of nonhuman animals, we may instrumentalize stories of the pandemic and turn them into devices and mechanisms through which to reassess the narratives purported by the show, and thus offer alternative and plausible readings that can be integrated into popular culture.
