Eaten alive: Anaconda man explains stunt

The American naturalist who filmed himself being eaten by an anaconda for a television event has explained what inspired him to take part in the risky stunt.

Paul Rosolie donned a special suit to let a 25-foot 400-pound snake eat him in a dangerous performance set to air on Discovery Channel.

He was so confident in the suit's design that he was more worried about the snake's safety than his own, the Daily Mail reported.

'I didn’t want to stress [the snake] out too much. I wanted to make sure that the suit was smooth and wasn’t going to hurt the snake,' Rosolie said. ' I really wasn’t scared. We tested this suit and worked on this with experts so we knew I was going to be safe.'

Amid a backlash from animal rights activists who believe the anaconda was tortured by being forced to eat Rosolie, a man much bigger than its usual prey, Rosolie has responded to say the snake was unharmed and that the experiment was designed to raise money to save the animal's habitat.

'I wanted to do something that would absolutely shock people,' Rosolie told the New York Post.

'Environmentalists, we love to preach to the choir. What I’m trying to do with this is bring in a bunch of people that wouldn’t necessarily know what’s going on in the Amazon.'

'For the type of attention that this is getting and for the type of emergency that’s going on down there — desperate times, desperate measures.'

'Once they see the show, these are people who are going to be supporters' he said. 'It’s a cool little dissonance there — they’re all coming out against me, but I’m the guy that’s been down there in the jungle trying to protect these things.'

Rosolie, a New Jersey native who first visited the Amazon at age 18, spent 60 days hiking through the rain forest in Peru with a team of about a dozen people searching for the right anaconda to take part in the stunt.