Remember the Netflix show Tiger King?

The guy that filmed Tiger King came out here and filmed for a day and then said,

You're not crazy enough to be in my movie?

Joe Exotic, the most famous of the guys featured in Tiger King,

is more of a caricature of life with big cats.

In Centerpoint, Indiana, a small farm town of about 200 people, there's a different Joe.

Joe Taft.

Yeah, I don't want to call myself Tiger Tang either, but yeah, I'm the guy that was serious about it.

Joe Taft is the owner of the exotic feline rescue center, a 260-acre government-licensed home for our large feline friends.

We have about 140 animals here right now. We have, of course, lions and tigers,

leopards, both black and spotted, cougars. We have bobcats and lynxes. Over the years,

we have had well over 500 lions in tigers here.

Joe Taft isn't nearly as flamboyant as the folks in Tiger King. He's a soft-spoken man, but he does have a big heart for big cats.

Yeah. big heart for big cats. My name is Baudelaire, and this is Atlas of Skira, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we go to Center Point, Indiana to the exotic feline rescue center to hear the story of how Joe Taft went from having a couple of feline friends to hundreds of them.

More after this. For over 30 years, the Exotic Feline Rescue Center has been a home for its founder Joe Taft and for big cats in need.

We are still growing. Right now we have a long list of animals that are waiting to come here.

We're struggling to build fast enough to fill the demand. According to Joe, animals at the

Exotic Feline Rescue Center aren't releasable. They're captive bred, meaning they'd have no idea how to survive in the wild.

And he says they come from all sorts of places.

Some were confiscated from bad living situations by the government.

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