Carole Baskin slams Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion’s WAP video for filming with big cats

Animal rights activist Carole Baskin has blasted Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion over their new music video. 

The racy video for their openly sexual single WAP features the pair dressed in animal print as leopards and white tigers roam freely.

The 59-year-old Tiger King star expressed misgivings in a statement about the use of big cats in the video, though they were filmed separately via green screen. 

Although the big cats were photoshopped in, Carole worried that the video will ‘glamorize the idea of rich people having tigers as pets.’ 

‘My guess is that most people won’t even see the photoshopped cats in the scenes because the rest of it is so lurid,’ she said.

‘I 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.’

Despite the safety steps taken to keep the wild animals away from the rappers and dancers, Carole said the shooting process could still be damaging to the big cats. 

‘You have to pose a wildcat in front of a green screen to get that image and that doesn’t happen in the wild. 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),’ she said.

She suggested the filmmakers might have worked with ‘one of the big cat pimps,’ whom she accused of ‘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 added.

Carole also feared that if the video made rich people want to have exotic pets, it could make ‘every ignorant follower want to imitate by doing the same.’ 

‘After tigers are too old for pay to play sessions by people like Joe Exotic, Bhagavan Antle, [Mark] McCarthy, Mario Tabraue and others, they become a liability instead of an asset,’ she said, warning that most of the cats would be killed secretly, though some might be given away to private collectors so that they could ‘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. Either way, it’s always abusive to the cat.’

Though Baskin has worked for years to save big cats from abusive owners and is the CEO of Big Cat Rescue near Tampa, Florida, her public profile rose dramatically following the release of Netflix’s buzzy Tiger King docuseries.

The show followed the rise and fall of Joseph Maldonado-Passage, better known as Joe Exotic, who ran the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma, featuring a number of big cats including a variety of tigers.

Carole was among Joe’s most vocal critics and claimed that he had been severely mistreating his animals.

In 2019, he was convicted of 17 federal charges for multiple instances of animal abuse and trying to hire an FBI agent to murder Carole.

Joe is currently serving a 22-year sentence in a federal penitentiary, but his one-time nemesis seems to have benefited from the publicity, even though die-hard fans of the series have spread conspiracy theories that she murdered her second husband and fed him to her tigers.