'Doc' Antle of ‘Tiger King’ convicted on wildlife trafficking charges

The owner of an animal park in South Carolina who was featured on the popular Netflix documentary Tiger King was convicted in Virginia last week on wildlife trafficking charges, state prosecutors announced.

Bhagavan Antle, better known as 'Doc' Antle, was charged in October 2020 with illegally purchasing endangered lion cubs in Virginia for display at the park, Myrtle Beach Safari, along with nine misdemeanor animal cruelty charges. A Virginia jury convicted him Friday of two felony counts of wildlife trafficking and two felony counts of conspiring to wildlife traffic, prosecutors said. Antle was cleared of all the misdemeanor charges he faced.

Each felony count is punishable by a maximum of five years imprisonment, according to state law. Antle is to be sentenced September 14.

Antle’s daughters Tawny Antle and Tilakam Watterson, who also faced misdemeanor animal cruelty charges, were cleared of all counts.

Antle made frequent appearances on Tiger King, the 2020 hit series that offered Americans quarantined during the pandemic an intimate look into the underbelly of the big-cat trade in the United States.

The show’s eccentric star, Joseph Maldonado-Passage, known as Joe Exotic, is serving a 21-year sentence in federal prison for a murder-for-hire plot that targeted Carole Baskin, an animal-welfare activist. She criticized Maldonado-Passage’s treatment of animals at his Oklahoma zoo and appeared on the Netflix show.

Antle, who is currently facing money laundering charges in a separate federal court case in South Carolina, denied “any act or conduct that could ever be considered as ‘animal cruelty,’” in a statement when the charges in Virginia were announced in 2020.

Jason Miyares, the state attorney general, said in a news release that the jury’s decision “sent a message that Virginia does not tolerate wildlife animal trafficking.”

Virginia law allows the trade of endangered wildlife, which includes lions, “for zoological, educational, or scientific purposes,” and for “preservation purposes,” only with special permission from a state board.

Antle’s lawyer, Erin Harrigan, called the jury’s decision not to convict Antle on the misdemeanor charges “a significant victory against spurious allegations of animal cruelty.” Harrigan said the felony offenses on which her client was convicted “amount to failing to obtain a permit for otherwise entirely lawful activity,” calling them “paperwork violations.”

The attorney general’s office, then headed by Mark R Herring, charged Antle in 2020 following a monthslong investigation into Antle’s ties with a Virginia-based zoo owner, Keith A Wilson, who was also indicted on wildlife trafficking charges.

An online court database showed Wednesday that Wilson’s case was still open.