HOLLYWOOD — Jeff Corwin spends a lot of time with wild animals. Which isn't always the safest thing to do.
The host of "The Jeff Corwin Experience" on cable's Animal Planet channel has been bitten and stung and cut and scraped innumerable times. "Well, it's hard getting medical insurance," Corwin joked.
But getting attacked by some animal, while it makes for interesting TV, is not one of his goals.
"My philosophy is if I'm getting bit, if I'm getting hurt, if I'm getting attacked or something like that, I'm not doing my job right," Corwin said. "I know that's something that people love to see and it's a question I often get asked, by my favorite moments in the show are moments where we're just kind of there, a part of the scenery, the animal comes in, we're able to interpret its natural history, apply the biological conservation information, and then it moves off without a lot of interruption.
"So, occasionally, I guess I'm not doing my job as well as I should and you do get nailed by something. But that's not my favorite thing to have happen."
But, of course, it does happen. Like on one recent trip to South America when Corwin was searching for vipers. He'd caught one and was placing it in a bag, using his snake stick to "suppress" the animal and make it safe for himself.
"I felt this, like, sharp pain hit my hand and I stopped and went, 'Oh, please don't let this happen again.' But I looked and everything seemed kind of OK," he said. So he assumed that he'd hit his hand on one of the nearby thornbushes.
It wasn't until he arrived back at camp and one of his crew members asked what had happened to the snake in the bag.
"On one side of the bag was blood," Corwin said, "and then on the other side of the bag there was this yellow stuff. And what we figured out happened was he bit me through the bag, his fang went through my finger, hit the bag (and) the bag sort of took all the venom. And it was my blood when he let go."
Crew members, of course, asked if Corwin was OK. And he replied, "I'll tell you in like four hours. But it was fine."
GIANT MONSTERS: Corwin comes up against some of the scariest creatures yet in an Animal Planet special, but he faced no danger of getting bitten. In "Giant Monsters" (Sunday, 6 p.m.), he faces computer-generated, prehistoric beasts, giant sloths, giant lizards and giant spiders.
"You've seen shows where these animals have been brought back to life in animation fashion, but not in a way where you have the host interacting with them," Corwin said. "Ultimately, I want my audience to have a good time. But the bigger goal of that is for them to learn through the process."
And both goals are accomplished in "Giant Monsters."
ANIMALS AT HOME: Corwin works with wild animals, but he doesn't have any at home. Not that he's pet-less.
"We have three cats . . . and that's plenty," he said. "I'm not a big supporter of exotic animals as pets." Instead, he has "simple, boring but very loving, overweight cats."
"We have one cat now that has sort of reached the zenith of being obese. No matter what we do, it won't lose weight. We cut down its food to half the fat and it eats twice as much. And now it's taken to eating lying down.
"And it's gone from having a double chin to a back chin."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com