Pott County man has cameo
Ron Hitt still hasn’t seen the ‘Tiger King,’ but it didn’t take long for him to know that he and wife Brenda appeared in a scene in the hit series.
“We’ve had probably 200 people text or message us on Facebook to say they say saw us,” he said.
The ‘Tiger King’ became a national phenomenon shortly after Netflix made it available in late March and people began binge-watching it to combat boredom brought on by the coronavirus quarantine.
If you need a recap, the show is about Joe Exotic, who ran an animal park in Wynnewood, and his far-stranger-than-fiction life.
Ron and Brenda Hitt, who live in Pott County, appeared in a scene in which Joe was campaigning for governor and appeared at the International Finals Youth Rodeo in Shawnee.
As Joe gripped-and-grinned his way through the crowd, he encountered the Hitts, and Ron him asked if he still had the animal park. Turns out, he did, but it was a far different environment from when Ron first encountered it more than a decade ago.
One of Ron’s job responsibilities with the department of agriculture was to inspect animal parks to ensure that food intended for the animals didn’t make it into the human food cycle.
Hmmmm.
More about that later.
Once, Ron was at an event off the park when Joe Exotic showed up with one of his tigers, and Ron had his photo made with the tiger.
“When Joe started out, he wasn’t nearly as flamboyant,” Ron said. “He was pretty normal.
“I went and liked what I saw, so we took our youth group to the park. Later, he turned into something totally different.”
One of the recurring elements in the show was the park staff collecting unsellable meat from local groceries and feeding it to the cats. Employees often ate some of the meat and the show implied that others might have been served such, as well.
“That may have happened, later,” Ron said. “But there was no indication of it 10 years ago.”