The Tiger King Zoo Has Closed Permanently After Report Of Animal Welfare Violations

The animal park featured on the Netflix show Tiger King is closing. The park's owner, Jeff Lowe, announced on Facebook that the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma will close "effectively immediately."

There will be a "new park," but it will be a closed set for new content based on Tiger King for TV and streaming services, Lowe said. The Facebook post has since been removed, but the details were reported on by Entertainment Weekly.

Lowe took over control of the park after the original owner, Joe Exotic, went to prison in a murder-for-hire plot. In May, the court ordered that ownership of the park would go to the rival park owner Carole Baskin. This decision came down after the judge ruled that Joe Exotic improperly transferred ownership of the zoo to Lowe, giving Lowe 120 days to leave.

More recently, the US Department of Agriculture suspended the zoo's license, citing multiple animal welfare violations, according to CNN.

"The Tiger King phenomenon has definitely changed our lives in many ways," Lowe said in the post. "It has brought us more attention than any human deserves, good and bad. It has, and probably will continue to, make us a target of every nutjob and animal rights loon in the world, but we are prepared."

The success of Tiger King has spawned multiple spin-off shows and new TV series is also in the works. The last we heard, Nicolas Cage will portray Joe Exotic, whose real name is Joe Maldonado-Passage--in an eight-episode TV series.

For more, check out GameSpot's guide to every character in Tiger King, ranked in order of how generally terrible they are.