Words matter. These are the best Eric Goode Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The reality of our world today is not every species can be left in the wild.
I’m not one who thinks that people should be locked up and thrown away the key.
Animal rights can be as extreme as not riding a horse, or not wearing leather, not having a pet at all. Animal welfare advocates are preventing the suffering of animals. And then there’s conservation and species conservation and what conservation biologists do.
I was a kid that loved reptiles and eventually started an organization dedicated to saving turtles and tortoises, called the Turtle Conservancy, where we protect land and basically do species conservation around the world.
I was definitely an 80s fashion victim who drank the Kool-Aid.
I spent my summers in Sonoma at my grandfather’s ranch, we called it Rancho Rodeo.
If you keep more 230 tigers, it’s like having 230 children, you don’t really love them, you’re just collecting them.
I definitely have, on paper, an unorthodox career path. And from childhood onward, I was always fascinated by the outdoors and wildlife.
The tiger people, the reptile people, they all have sort of unique subcultures. Kind of like ‘Best in Show.’
I kept a few turtles and tortoises and maybe a snake in my apartment in New York City, off and on. Maybe sometimes against my better judgment.
There are times when you do have to bring animals into captivity to save a species like California Condors, or Arabian Aurochs. But they have something called species survival plans, and they do it in a very thoughtful way and are careful with the genetics.
Sometimes our criminal justice system is about punishing people and not reforming people.
Then I began filming a world that I knew quite a bit about. I was peripherally involved in that world much of my life – the exotic reptile world, the collectors, the dealers, the smugglers.
Look, when we were building Area, we were so driven and focused, partly because none of us came from money.
I can only imagine there still have to be nightclubs where 21-year-olds go.
But in this case people have hundreds and hundreds of animals, they have a menagerie. You can’t possibly love that many animals. So, it’s more about the ego and the pride of having all of these things sort of like a car collection or a gun collection.
I probably spent about 40 percent of 2019 on a plane and filming.
But I was just really blown away that you could just buy a snow leopard. For me, it was like buying a panda bear or a Komodo dragon.
Unlike accredited zoos like the Bronx Zoo, San Diego Zoo, the Los Angeles Zoo, these are private menageries, and these people are frightened and there is an existential fear that they are going to be shut down by the government, by PETA, by HSUS, by animal rights groups. So they, generally, are very guarded.
If hotels are replacing nightclubs, then they’re replacing nightclubs for yuppies.
What you do in Oklahoma with tigers in these roadside zoos would be frowned on if it opened in the L.A. basin or New York. I think it’s a lack of education. And people believe we should be able to have a tiger, because this is America – who should stop us?
Later in life, I started an organization that works to save tortoises and turtles that are threatened, but in full disclosure, I still always had a fascination with people who kept animals.
There is animal rights and animals rights organizations like PETA, then there’s animal welfare, which is very different than animal rights.
When something changes in Episode 7, you have to then begin moving things around, shuffling things backwards. Once you start moving material into it, that can derail your whole arc.
The real takeaway should be to give your money to conservation programs around the world that are really working hard to save tigers in their range countries and not give your money to sanctuaries, which are really, effectively just caging tigers and cats.
