Did you know that there was a female version of the Tiger King in New Jersey? Most people wouldn’t, but stories like these are the kind that Orchid Thief author Susan Orlean loves.
Happenings and creatures that are just in the margins or that are, for lack of a more eloquent term, weird. It makes sense, given that Orlean’s book is about a man who stole orchids. But she has an affinity for animals, too.
“I wrote this piece about a woman in New Jersey who had 27 pet tigers,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal. No, it was not “Tiger King” but it was similar. “This was an incident that took place in New Jersey probably 15 years ago in the middle of the suburban town in New Jersey.”