Cardi B clapped back at Carole Baskin Thursday in response to the “Tiger King” star’s complaints that her “WAP” music video with Megan Thee Stallion encourages animal cruelty by its use of big cats.
“I’m not gonna engage with Carole Baskin on that,” Cardi said in an interview with i-D. “Like, that’s just ridiculous you know? Oh, Lord. Like, girl you killed your goddamn husband.”
In an Aug. 9 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the founder and CEO of Big Cat Rescue voiced concerns about a few scenes in the “WAP” video that include wild cats. Although she astutely pointed out that the cats look photoshopped and that “it didn’t look like the cats were really in the rooms with the singers,” she thinks the shots were likely procured by a “big cat pimp.”
“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. “That tells me they probably dealt with one of the big cat pimps, probably even one of the ones shown in Tiger King, Murder, Mayhem and Madness, who make a living from 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.”
Baskin also says Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s video “glamorizes the idea of rich people having tigers as pets.”
That said, Baskin doubts that viewers will even notice the cats with everything else that’s going on in the video.
“My guess is that most people won’t even see the photoshopped cats in the scenes because the rest of it is so sexually explicit,” she said.