Hey, you cool cats and kittens, Carole Baskin is bringing her love for big cats to the stage of “Dancing with the Stars.” The big cat owner is best known for appearing on Netflix’s “The Tiger King.” Baskin, 59, will start Season 29, of DWTS in a tiger, themed outfit while dancing to big hits like “Survivor” and “Eye of the Tiger”.
She told USA Today that, “We are doing ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ I’m so excited about that. Baskins said, “I told the costume department, no fur, no feathers, no leather. But anything else, I don’t care how wild. I just said to have a blast. I can’t wait to find out what they come up with.”
Baskin became an overnight media sensation after the Tiger King appeared back in January; with her rivalry against Joe Exotic and the strange circumstances surrounding the disappearance of her husband, everyone became fascinated with Baskin.
She is also the founder and owner of Big Cat Rescue. A sanctuary where big cats such as tigers, lions, and leopards are rescued and shown off to the public. Baskin’s second husband, Howard Baskin, helps her run the sanctuary and is her biggest supporter. She married him ten years after her first husband went missing.
Despite all of the fun that Baskin hopes to have on DWTS, she wants all the spotlight to be on her big cats. Baskin voiced her concerns to E-News, telling them about her hopes to give the message that big cats don’t belong in cages.
“That’s why I feel so much pressure to stay in this competition for as long as I possibly can,” Baskin said. “Because every single week, I hope to be giving that message in front of people that these cats don’t belong in cages, and we have to save them in the wild before they disappear completely.”
The Tiger King star also revealed that she had many media offers from different outlets as soon as the Netflix show aired. But she didn’t want to have any involvement with any of them. But when the offer to star alongside others on DWTS was offered, her daughter convinced her to do it.
She revealed to E-News that her daughter said, “Mom, you’ve got to do this.” And so I contacted them and I thought about what they would do to pair me with a star because I have never seen this show and didn’t know how it worked.”
She went on to say, “So once I found out how it actually worked I was even more mortified, but I wanted to do it for my daughter because she does so much for me.”
Even though Baskin loves her newfound fame, she says the person who she was depicted as on the Tiger King is not who she really is. She felt like the producers at Netflix were dishonest and did it more for entertainment than bringing awareness to animal rescue.
“I am not at all the person I was portrayed in Tiger King,” says Baskin. “I am the type of person who will come after any person who is abusing animals. I am relentless. I just won’t stop until I find some legal way to make it stop. From that perspective, I think they got me right. Me as a person, that was a total assassination of my character for nothing other than whatever money they could get for selling that to Netflix.”
You can watch Dancing with the stars on these live streaming networks Fubo TV, Hulu With Live TV, YouTube TV, and AT&T TV Now.
