“Eaten Alive” host Paul Rosolie shook off PETA’s outrage over the stunt during an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” because “the whole reason” he did the show is to raise awareness for protecting the Amazon rainforest and the animals that live in it.
“The whole reason we did this show is because I’ve worked in the Amazon, I’ve seen it being destroyed. And everyone knows the whole ‘rainforest is being destroyed’ thing, but it’s not stopping it from happening,” Rosolie told Kimmel on Monday. “We got millions of people talking about this stuff going, ‘Why on earth would this idiot want to do this?’ And this is the reason, to try to keep the place where these things live intact.”
Rosolie was blasted by PETA and viewers for participating in the 2-hour Discovery Channel special that PETA criticized for being “inexcusable torment of a captured wild green anaconda,” while most of the 4.1 million viewers tuning in were just pissed he wasn’t actually eaten alive .
“It’s funny, because I feel like PETA and everyone else has watched the last 2o minutes of the show, and they’re hinging on that, and totally forgetting everything else about the fact that we’re actually trying to protect these animals,” Rosolie said.
Rosolie says he wasn’t particularly troubled by so many people being disturbed that he wasn’t eaten by an anaconda, because “they missed the point of the whole show, then.”
“But I could destroy at ‘Mean Tweets,’” Rosolie added.
“I don’t know what you’re doing for your next special, but I’d like to see you have sex with a hippo,” Kimmel joked. “Think about the rainforest!”