On December 7, 2014, Discovery Channel was ready to show a 20-foot anaconda devour conservationist Paul Rosolie whole. The special was titled Eaten Alive, which certainly made it seem like Rosolie would end up in the belly of the beast.
The idea was that Rosolie would wear a protective carbon-fiber suit, slather himself in pig blood, and let the snake him and then regurgitate him. Rosolie claimed the point of the stunt was to bring attention to habitat loss in the Amazon.
“I’ve seen firsthand how the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed,” he said, per Deadline. “It is so rampant that we may be the last generation with the opportunity to save it. People need to wake up to what is going on. What better way is there to shock people than to put my life on the line with the largest snake on the planet, the green anaconda?”
Discovery was already feeling the squeeze before Eaten Alive even aired. More than 38,000 people signed a petition demanding the cancellation of the special and a boycott of the channel. “This is animal abuse to the highest degree and absolutely disgusting,” the petition reads.
PETA also spoke out about the special, calling it a “blatant publicity stunt” that, judging from the description, sounded like “the snake was tormented and suffered for the sake of ratings.”
In the lead-up to Eaten Alive’s airing, Rosolie made the press rounds to hype up the special. “The last thing I remember is seeing the snake’s mouth open straight at my face. Everything went black,” he said on Today. “It was like being caught in a wave. It was just wrapped up, and you feel that crush. For over an hour, I was being constricted, and then…”
And then…? Well, Rosolie wouldn’t say. “They don’t tell you how the tightrope walker makes it across,” he told the baffled TODAY hosts.
What Rosolie wouldn’t say — or couldn’t say — is that he never ended up in the belly of the beast. Out of the Eaten Alive’s two-hour runtime, 90 minutes were devoted to the mythical, 25-foot anaconda Rosolie purportedly found on a prior expedition, as The Washington Post reported. Rosolie had no luck finding that snake while the Eaten Alive cameras rolled, so he had to face off against a backup.
And in the last 15 minutes of the special, viewers finally saw Rosolie grappling with the snake… and then tapping out when it felt like the snake would break his arm. “I felt her jaws lock onto my helmet,” he said later, per The Hollywood Reporter. “I felt her gurgling and wheezing, but then I felt her let go. She got my arm into a position where her force was fully on my exposed arm. I started to feel the blood drain out of my hand, and I felt the bone flex. And when I got to the point where I felt like it was going to snap, I had to tap out.”
It was an anticlimactic result for a special the Discovery website promised would show Rosolie “enter[ing] the belly of an anaconda,” per the Daily Mirror. And viewers felt conned.
“Calling it #EatenAlive is like having a show on the Food Network about cooking a turkey and all they do after two hours is preheat the oven,” wrote one Twitter user.
“I guess calling this ‘Getting Squeezed Really Hard’ didn’t sound as enticing,” another person wrote.
PETA condemned the special in another statement after the airing, saying that viewers weren’t the only ones deceived. “The chosen snake was deceived into using her precious energy reserves to constrict a human being pretending to be a pig, all for a publicity stunt,” the organization said in part, per Post. “Under natural conditions, anacondas go weeks and even months between meals, eating only when necessary for survival and expending the tremendous amount of energy required to attack, constrict, and consume large prey only when the payoff outweighs the risk. Paul Rosolie and his crew put this snake through undeniable stress and robbed her of essential bodily resources.”
Casting even more skepticism on the whole endeavor, Vox reported that Rosolie’s credentials as a herpetologist were hard to track down and that it seemed like Rosolie was provoking the snake into attacking him.
“I was extremely disappointed that when given an opportunity to produce a show that would highlight the amazing biology of this animal, that Discovery went with a production that is only based on fear and sensationalism,” Dr. Stephen Secor, then a biological science professor at the University of Alabama, told Business Insider.
At first, Discovery — a channel that had aired “docufiction” like Mermaids: The Body Found and Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives — defended the special.
“Paul created this challenge to get maximum attention for one of the most beautiful and threatened parts of the world, the Amazon rainforest, and its wildlife,” the channel said in a statement to ABC News. “He went to great lengths to send this message and it was his absolute intention to be eaten alive. Ultimately, after the snake constricted Paul for over an hour and went for his head, the experiment had to be called when it became clear that Paul would be very seriously injured if he continued on. The safety of Paul, as well as the anaconda, was always our number one priority.”
In comments at a Television Critics Association press tour a month later, however, incoming Discovery boss Rich Ross said the show had “the right intention with a packaging that was misleading,” per TheWrap.
And Ross, who was president of Discovery for another three years, tempered hopes (or fears) of an Eaten Alive sequel, saying, “I don’t believe you’ll be seeing a person being eaten by a snake in my time [at the channel].”
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