People Try to Pet Tigers Sometimes... (2023)

True-crime youtuber Matt Orchard kicks off his 20-minute meditation on animal / human relations with a warning: “The following video contains visuals and especially audio of people in extreme pain, as well as other content that some may find disturbing.” It’s certainly true but he doesn’t warn—probably can’t—that many could find themselves literally laughing at the agonizing cries of pain, which are repeated for effect. Sure enough, the screams are the next thing we hear from a 911 call coming from a zoo in Florida. It’s amazing, in a way, that this victim even had the wherewithal to make the call. Orchard has previously made his feelings known about “Florida Man” incidents, and here we are again. The tale is about not one but two cases at Florida zoos in recent years where employees who are not responsible for animal care in any way decided it would be fun, or something, to go pet a tiger. These big cats are so adorable, after all—like Hobbes in the cartoon, or something. Orchard reminds us, however, that tigers are apex predators and generally more likely to show aggression than affection to random humans who hop safety fences and stick their arms through the wires of their fences for a little skritch-skritch. The worst visual details here are pixelated away but details about how the teeth inside a tiger’s mouth work are made quite clear. Your imagination gets some workout from this. Sadly, one of the tigers must be put down as the only solution to save a fool’s forearm. Orchard’s disgust with these two is palpable but, as he says, in the end most of us are going to have to side with the human in the immediate situation. It doesn’t help the endangered tigers any, whose dwindling numbers on the planet only make the situation worse. Zoo employees are seen crying over the incident and you may not be far from it either. We never hear from either of the fools—but what could they possibly say that wouldn’t make us think twice about who to shoot in the clinch? All you can do, Orchard implies, is run that agonizing audio a few times repetitively and let it become the cruel and savage joke that it and most “Florida Man” incidents are.

The Scott Peterson Affair (2022)

I was intrigued to see Matt Orchard take up the Scott Peterson case on his Crime and Society youtube channel, because it was one I never got to and I was happy for the chance to see it laid out. Scott Peterson’s wife Laci, eight months pregnant, disappeared on Christmas Eve of 2002 while Scott spent the day fishing. Then news came he had been having an affair. Later Laci’s body was recovered from the San Francisco Bay. At the time the case broke, circa early 2003, I was too busy to wallow in the true-crime cable coverage (as I had with OJ Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, and others). The coming of Nancy Grace was a turnoff, for one thing. She was and is an unpleasant presence on crime stories because her takes feel less like mama-bear instincts to protect victims (because she is one herself, etc., etc.) and more like bitter vindictiveness thirsty to punish miscreants. Partly because of that, and partly because all the evidence against Scott Peterson seemed circumstantial, and partly because I just wasn’t following it closely, something about the case seemed off to me. Aren’t there any number of spouse-on-spouse homicides in any given year? Why was this the one selected for the high profile treatment? Maybe because he seems like such a creep? OK, but it’s weak sauce. Orchard focuses on that—the visceral reaction Peterson provokes in so many (including me to some degree), which is almost uncanny—and then basically gives us the sequence of events and the theories and how they stack up. Then, with 15 or 20 minutes to go in the 70-minute video, he switches up and addresses the Scott Peterson truthers, those who believe he’s wrongly convicted based on public outrage and a rush to judgment. They have various evidence, including witness statements, to shore up their case. This had been my sense of it. But it’s all a red herring on Matt Orchard’s part as these theories quickly fall apart on close examination. A few key details of fact (via cell towers and such) make the circumstantial evidence of Peterson's guilt almost irrefutable. It’s a pretty neat trick—it might even be a spoiler for me to reveal it. But I feel like any doubt about the case is cleared away here with Orchard’s usual patient, straightforward explanations. And I think the notoriety of the case has less to do with Scott Peterson and more to do with the hungry maw of true-crime cable news coverage and Nancy Grace as its face. I still think she’s a shabby person to represent true-crime to the general public. Let’s make it Matt Orchard.

The Coldest Case Ever Solved (2021)

My true-crime interests inevitably intersected with my youtube travels and led me to a type of video that is obviously low-budget and fairly called amateur. The ones I tend to prefer—channels such as Hailey Elizabeth, Stephanie Harlowe, or That Chapter—are basically run by natural storytellers. They do their research and present their findings in narrative fashion (Elizabeth while she is putting on makeup), fortified by available footage and audio that can apparently be found on the internet, some of very poor quality. Most of these videos run 30 to 60 minutes though some can go on for hours if the case is weird and/or complicated enough. Matt Orchard, an Australian (or possibly New Zealander), is one of the best. His channel, Matt Orchard – Crime and Society, has ideas about larger issues like coerced confessions, problems with lie detectors, and other troubled aspects of justice systems (mainly US). These issues make solving crimes tricky business and often exercises in whether we can ever know the truth about some things (and, by implication, anything). Orchard also takes on celebrity cases such as Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard, the JonBenet Ramsey mystery, or Anthony Wiener—probably looking for internet traffic, but his treatment of the Ramsey case is one of the best I’ve seen. As often as not, as in his latest, How Chandler Halderson Didn't Come Close to Getting Away With Murder, he’s riffing on bizarre cases simply for their own sake, and sometimes even indulging a little copaganda, an ongoing pitfall of the genre. Like many youtubers, Orchard has an accompanying Patreon account where even more information and early access can be had for something like $2 a month. The Coldest Case Ever Solved balances a lot of his favored crime elements in one of his best videos, a one-hour treatment. The details are there to be discovered. They aren't what you expect. The case involves a 7-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered in 1957 and the trial of a man accused of the crime 55 long years later, in 2012. A lot of what makes the video work is the case itself. But Orchard’s acerbic recounting has a lot to do with it too, taking us through all the twists and turns. His research feels clinically precise, always—one of my favorite things about Orchard’s videos is the feeling they are authoritative. In that way he separates himself from a lot of the hysterical internet sleuths populating forums and youtube. I like to think Orchard is better than most of them. At the very least, the entertainment value is high. If you like this, try five more.