Big Cat Rescue Of 'Tiger King' Sells Tampa-Area Property

TAMPA, FL — Big Cat Rescue sold a portion of its Hillsborough County property for $19.5 million at the end of last year, according to multiple reports.

The animal sanctuary and its founder, animal rights activist Carole Baskin, rose to fame as part of the 2020 Netflix series “Tiger King,” which ran for two seasons.

The series focused on her feud with Joe Exotic, who ran an animal park, which included tigers and bears, in Oklahoma. Baskins accused him of abusing animals there.

Howard Baskin, who owns Big Cat Rescue and its property with his wife, said the land will likely be redeveloped into about 300 townhomes by a Clearwater-based firm, Bay News 9 said.

The sale, which closed Dec. 24, includes 56 of the animal rescue’s 67 acres, WFTS reported. The sale of the remaining 11 acres will be finalized within the next few weeks.

The couple closed their 30-year-old wildlife sanctuary in 2023 and moved all of its animals to Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

In an interview with Patch at the time, Carole and Howard Baskin said it's always been their goal to “put ourselves out of business."

"For 30 years, the mission of Big Cat Rescue has been expressed as having three prongs: to give the best life we could to the cats in our care, to stop the abuse and to avoid extinction of big cats in the wild," they said. "For those same 30 years, we have always said that our goal was to put ourselves out of business, meaning that there would be no big cats in need of rescue and no need for the sanctuary to exist."

The couple said that goal was accomplished when President Joe Biden signed the Big Cat Public Safety Act, H.R. 263 into law in December 2022, a law that the Baskins, PETA and Animal Wellness Action worked for 11 years to pass.

Funds from the sale will be used to help with the care of their animals in Arkansas.

"The win-win solution both for our captive cats and the cats in the wild is for us to merge our cat population with the population at another existing accredited sanctuary and devote the remaining resources of our sanctuary to the 'in situ' projects being conducted around the world to avoid extinction," Howard wrote in a statement on the Big Cat Rescue website.