“I was turned off by it,” said Antoine Yates, who became known as New York City’s Tiger Man long before the wild popularity of Netflix’s documentary mini-series. “It just shows how ignorant these so-called exotic animal lovers can be.”
Mr. Yates also got momentarily famous for keeping a full-grown tiger, this one named Ming. But rather than the more rural settings favored by Joe Exotic and the show’s other big-cat enthusiasts, he kept Ming in his Harlem apartment, for more than two years.
In 2001, Mr. Yates, then a 31-year-old construction worker, brought the 8-week-old cub to his sprawling home in a Harlem housing project.
Ming quickly went from bottle feeding to consuming 20 pounds of chicken thighs a day, which Mr. Yates would heft home each morning from a local supermarket. And in less than three years, the Siberian-Bengal mix grew into a 425-pound behemoth.
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