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Wednesday, Jun 15, 2011 7:16 PM UTC

Henry Rollins hosts new show “Animal Underworld”

Nat Geo Wild has hired the Black Flag frontman to host a show about exotic creatures and the people who eat them

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Topics: Reality TV, Noble Beasts, Restaurant Culture, Television,

Henry Rollins hosts new show Henry Rollins with a burmese python in Los Angeles, CA. (Photo Credit: © NGT)(Credit: Ngt)

Henry Rollins is coming to National Geographic Wild, and he’s going to shake things up! In a new show called “Animal Underworld” the spoken-word artist will travel to different locales and see how people use (and potentially abuse) exotic creatures.

 Just for a quick reference, this is Henry Rollins’ second time on Nat Geo Wild: He previously hosted “Snake Underworld,” where he sat around and watched a guy shoot up black mamba poison. Why? Because that is how Rollins rolls, yo. And because it makes for some great television.

I’m guessing “Animal Underworld” is going to be a lot like this clip, except with grosser stunts (“Watch me drink this lemur piss!”) and more public advocacy for not doing horrible things to animals (“Please don’t capture endangered lemurs to drink their piss, good sir”). According to National Geographic’s senior V.P.:

“It’s really an investigation into our relationship with animals,” he says. “It’s covering the full range from the off-beat and quirky to the potentially illicit. And our approach to [the latter] is to make sure that we’re obviously not encouraging that behavior.”

And obviously, the show is not going to be some voyeuristic partaking like “Animal Hoarding,” on Animal Planet, which is apparently a real thing. How is “Animal Hoarding” different from A&E’s “Hoarders,” since half the time the people are hoarding animals on that show anyway? Well, either way, “Animal Underworld” is not going to be that at all. Although there will be a segment that has been described thusly:

Rollins visits Arizona’s Road Kill Café, where the menu features not-so-exotic fare. And he meets people who consume things you would not find on the menu even at the Road Kill, like frog smoothies and tarantulas — the former because it supposedly increases virility and the latter for medicinal purposes.

Which, you know, kind of sounds worse than animal hoarding. Maybe Rollins will scream at these people until they stop, adding a humanitarian factor to the proceeding?

Other series picked up by Nat Geo Wild include “Baby Animal Cam” and “Babies Gone Wild,” the difference in the two being that the former uses entirely original footage and the latter uses clips of baby animals found on the Internet.

Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

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