In a docuseries full of villains, Kevin Antle — sometimes known as Doc or Bhagavan — somehow rose to the top.
The cameras of Tiger King mostly follow colorful Oklahoma roadside zoo owner Joe Exotic and his ongoing feud with Carol Baskin, who runs a tiger sanctuary in Florida. But Antle and his Myrtle Beach, S.C., operation nearly steal the show. As Tiger King depicts it, Antle has surrounded himself with a harem of young, exploitable women, and has been accused of euthanizing tigers to make room for more lucrative cubs.
As it turns out, Middle Tennessee could have been home to Antle’s antics if the zookeeper had gotten his way three decades ago.
Antle’s efforts to build the “Nashville Zoological Park” in Cheatham County were the subject of multiple front-page Tennessean stories in 1989 and 1990, though Antle himself quickly disappeared. The stories started in December 1989, when The Tennessean reported (above the fold, complete with a photo of Antle and an African lion) that the future TV star and a man named Mike Stuart were planning to open their park a few months later.
At the time, there were multiple groups trying to build a zoo in the Nashville area; a rival group was not impressed by Antle and Stuart’s operation. It did not devolve to murder-for-hire, but it did get nasty.
Connie Cloak, executive director of the Zoological Society of Middle Tennessee, described Antle’s planned park as a “second-rate, chain-link menagerie,” to which Stuart cried “jealousy.”
Cloak moved to the Bay Area shortly after her organization fell apart. She watched a couple episodes of Tiger King, but she didn’t connect the Doc Antle in the show to the man with whom she’d feuded three decades ago.
“I remember thinking vaguely, ‘Yeah, I’ve known a few creepy animal people over the years,’ ” Cloak tells the Scene. “I did a pretty good job of blocking out a lot of that memory.”
Her memory freshly jogged (though she admits the years have dulled her recollection), Cloak recalls meeting Antle at least twice. Once, Antle and Stuart came to her office unannounced to offer to combine their efforts.
“That may be when they told me they met at Cape Girardeau, which immediately alerted me,” says Cloak. “Because no self-respecting zoo person would ever admit they’d been to the Cape Girardeau animal auction.”
The second time Cloak met the duo, she recalls, was when Antle’s group invited her organization’s board to a meeting at a local consulting firm’s office in a downtown high-rise. Unannounced, Antle’s group said they were taking the board on a field trip to the zoo site in Cheatham County. Cloak and the others piled into two limos, as she remembers it. At the site, they saw little but a man on a bulldozer (she recalls it being Antle), but her board was impressed enough to throw their hands up and give in to the further-along effort.
After her organization dissolved, Cloak had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized for a short time. She remembers getting an anonymous phone call late one night after that from a woman who said she thought Cloak ought to know something: “Kevin Antle was bragging to everybody that he’d driven me crazy.”
In March 1990, Antle drew even more attention. He was displaying his white tiger cubs Sheba and Akbar at the Great Lakes of the South Outdoor Show at the Nashville Convention Center, for which he and the cubs received a glowing feature, complete with photo, from The Tennessean’s outdoors writer.
Just a week later, a reporter writing on the front page of the daily revealed that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had investigated Antle due to allegations that a tiger mauled a visitor to one of his parks in Virginia. (The story also questioned whether Antle actually had a doctorate from a British university, which didn’t seem to exist.) The next week, the editorial board would question Antle’s zoo.
Though Antle’s time in the Nashville area was short, he made the most of it. In addition to his star turn at the outdoor show, he was featured on an episode of NewsChannel 5’s Talk of the Town that also included current Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who at the time had yet to embark on her career in elected office. According to TV listings, she took a “look at shoe fashions” on the episode in question.
By May 1990, less than six months after the newspaper introduced Antle to readers on its front page, the same writer reported that Antle had left the zoo over “differences of opinion, differences of philosophy” — not, the zoo’s Ingram Group publicist promised, because of “a series of incidents on the property.” (One neighbor reported that zoo employees killed her dog and her father-in-law’s dog with a high-powered rifle; another report had an African antelope escaping the property.)
Antle, the newspaper said, had moved on, “reported to be in Knoxville or somewhere in Florida.”
