The highly-anticipated Tiger King 2 landed on Netflix this morning and for many, immediately answered the question: “What should we watch this evening?”
Netflix’s sequel to its hit true crime docuseries picks up from where season one left off, giving viewers an insight into the aftermath of Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin and the other subjects becoming global celebrities.
While Joe Exotic is now behind bars, many viewers have been wondering what exactly happened to the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park, which was the backdrop for most of season one – so we’ve compiled an extensive guide to what has happened to the zoo since the events of the first season.
Read on for everything you need to know about the GW. Zoo and what happened to it.
What happened to the GW Zoo?
After Joe Exotic was convicted of attempted murder for hire against Carole Baskin in 2019, Jeff Lowe took over the park, as he had purchased the zoo from Exotic back in 2016.
Shortly after Exotic was incarcerated, Lowe made plans to close the existing park and move it to a new location in Thackerville, Oklahoma, but in the meantime, renamed the zoo Tiger King Park.
Lowe formed a partnership with Tim Stark, the founder of Wildlife in Need, with the pair planning on running the new Thackerville park together by joining the Tiger King Park animals and some of the Wildlife in Need animals, but after discovering they had “philosophical differences”, Lowe kicked Stark off of the property.
In May 2020, an Oklahoma federal judge ruled that ownership of the park should be given to Baskin, as it was ruled that Exotic had fraudulently transferred the zoo to his mother to avoid paying debts from Baskin’s successful 2016 lawsuit.
As a result, Lowe was forced to vacate the property and remove all animals within 120 days, however as the US Department of Agriculture discovered that upon inspection, many of the animals at the park were suffering from flystrike (where flesh-eating maggots grow inside on an animal’s skin), Lowe’s zoo-owning license was suspended and the animals were confiscated.
As of August 2020, the original GW Zoo has been shut down and Baskin sold the land on the condition that it is never used to keep exotic animals in the future.