Cardi B’s new single “WAP” featuring Megan Thee Stallion has the world talking nonstop. From celebrity cameos to its sexually explicit lyrics and exotic animals, fans were left yearning for more, while others were left filled with anger.
Tiger King Star and Big Cat Rescue CEO Carole Baskin slammed the “WAP” video- which featured multiple exotic wild cats, including white Siberian tigers and leopards. To her, the music video “glamorizes the idea of rich people having tigers as pets.”
In a statement to Entertainment Weekly, Baskin said:
“My guess is that most people won’t even see the photoshopped cats in the scenes because the rest of it is so sexually explicit.”
White Siberian Tigers are said to be near extinction, with only as many as 500 remaining around the world. According to National Geographic, their dwindling population is due to loss of habitat as a result of deforestation, being poached, or illegally hunted for their fur and for body parts that are used for traditional medicines.
Like Siberian tigers, leopards are considered critically endangered in several regions, including North Africa, the Middle East, and Russia. As of last year (2019), over 80 leopards live in the wild (mostly in protected areas), while others are in captivity.
“That being said, you have to pose a wildcat in front of a green screen to get that image, and that doesn’t happen in the wild,” Baskin added. “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). That tells me they probably dealt with one of the big cat pimps, probably even one of the ones shown in Tiger King, Murder, Mayhem and Madness, who make 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.”
She continued:
“That makes every follower of these artists, who doesn’t know better, want to imitate by doing the same,” she explains. “After tigers are too old for pay to play sessions by people like Joe Exotic, Bhagavan [Doc] Antle, Marc McCarthy, Mario Tabraue and others, they become a liability instead of an asset. While I think most are destroyed behind closed gates at that point, some end up being given away to people who want to have a tiger to show off. That never works out, and the cats either die or end up dumped in sanctuaries or worse yet, breeding mills. There have been some accounts of tigers just being turned loose on communities when they no longer served as ego props. No matter how you cut it, it’s always abusive to the cat and dangerous to the public.”
However, Baskin informed Billboard that she was “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.”
PETA also weighed in on Cardi’s “WAP” video, giving the news outlet this critique of the rapper’s use of computer-generated animals:
“If Tiger King taught us anything, it’s that tigers and other wild animals are abused for music videos, selfies, and gawking roadside zoo visitors. So, if real animals were used instead of computer-generated imagery, the message sent is that animal exploitation is Okurrr—and it isn’t. If Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion really care about pussy liberation, they wouldn’t use suffering big cats as props.”
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