TikTok star Kyle Thomas who has more followers than Taylor Swift on building a Zoo in NI
A TikToker who has more followers on the platform than Taylor Swift has appeared on ITV's Lorraine show to chat about opening a new Zoo in Northern Ireland.
The 20-year-old appeared on Lorraine on Monday morning and discussed TikTok, taking a break from social media, and his new animal sanctuary with his documentary 'We Built a Zoo' on BBC having aired recently.
The programme description explains: "During his teenage years, TikTok star Kyle Thomas built up a small menagerie of exotic animals that lived at home with him and his mother. Having already gained a huge social media following by sharing his life online, he started to post about his daily life with his animals and soon amassed 35 million followers. But his posts drew some criticism from animal rights activists, and Kyle and his mother began to realise that their house wasn’t the best environment for his animals.
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"In this film, Kyle decides to build his own animal sanctuary, but navigating planning regulations and upset neighbours is a lot to take on for a 19-year-old. When his venture fails, he’s left desperately seeking a forever home for his pets. Enter local builder and small wildlife park owner Phil Hughes, who reaches out and offers to help. Together, they decide to build a zoo."
On Monday's Lorraine show, presenter Ranvir Singh said: "You've felt both sides of the social media world, haven't you? You've felt the backlash... you started showing off your beautiful little exotic animals that you've always loved and your family have always kept."
Kyle, who has nearly 35million followers on TikTok, replied: "I had the exotic animals before TikTok. I started sharing them with people and they loved it."
Ranvir said: "And then the welfare issues came in. People are, quite rightly... can be very touchy and very concerned about, 'is it right for these animals to be in your home?'"
Kyle replied: "And be protective over the fact that those animals have instinctive needs and that they need more than that. And also, the biggest thing was that it wasn't giving off the right... even if we were providing them with as much as we could at home, people are seeing that and they're like, 'oh, I can now do this'.
"And it wasn't encouraging people in the right way which was a massive thing that I realised, I was like, I have to do something to show people that actually, I'm going to educate myself and exotic animals don't belong in the house and I think that that's the journey I've been on this year, by going here and going there, and really hearing from these people. Not just because people online are telling me this is what I should be doing, I want to understand, why is this not right?"
Ranvir continued: "You and your mum [have gone], 'yeah we've got something wrong here'. With the capybara... there was a bit of backlash and your mum got in a bit of trouble over that."
Kyle then took a break from social media. His documentary 'We Built a Zoo' was then aired. The 20-year-old said: "I took that time off of social media... I was actually spending loads of time just learning. Because I was like, 'there's something up here, exotic animals don't belong in the house'. I had sort of started to hear more about the bad sides of the exotic pet trade. I was like, 'I want to be a part of the solution of this'. I want to tell people, let's not have exotic pets. I want to be a part of the solution not the problem. So I took that time out and it was really amazing, and then the documentary started filming."
Kyle says he bought land in Northern Ireland "to try and do better" and "make a sanctuary for exotic pets that people no longer could take care of or they wanted to give them more".
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