Carole Baskin has said she received death threats after Tiger King first aired.
The animal rights activist told ITV’s This Morning she has “always had to be on high alert” because of people who oppose her work.
She said after the Netflix show became available on the streaming platform her “phone started ringing and it rang every two minutes for three months with people screaming obscenities at me”.
Baskin said people told her “they want to kill me, they wanted to kill my family, they wanted to kill the cats, they wanted to burn the place to the ground”.
She added: “Actually my life has been threatened for the past 20 years since we have been working on the bills to end the captivity of big cats and what you guys saw in Tiger King was just one person and a couple of threats.
“Over the past 20 years, I’ve had to hire bodyguards to go with me when I’d speak in public.
“I’ve been physically attacked by people, so I’m very happy this one person [Joe Exotic] is in prison.
“I think it had a chilling effect on these people that have been threatening me so much, but it’s not any different to how it was before Tiger King because I’ve always had to be on high alert because of people who abuse big cats.
“They have no respect of life of any kind.”