Interview with Pat Spain - Weirld.com

Pat Spain answers questions about the show in the Weirld.com interview.

Looking a bit like Justin Timberlake with an easy grin and an enthusiasm that’s infectious, Pat Spain is a wildlife scientist with a special interest in crypto-zoological creatures, ones that may or may not exist, and he’s traveled the globe to investigate them for the new National Geographic Channel series Beast Hunter, premiering Mar. 4. Having grown up the middle of three kids in Wynantskill, New York and earned his Bachelor of Science from Suffolk University in Boston, Spain created a Web series called Nature Calls in 2005, which ultimately put him on Nat Geo’s radar. “I’m so excited to be doing this and it means a lot that other people are getting interested in it too,” he says. He had a lot more to say in the following conversation.

How does your show differ from others, such as History Channel’s Monster Quest?
I feel like a lot of these shows rely on the ‘we just don’t know’ factor, quick camera turns and ‘what was that?’ Blair Witch style stuff. It’s a quest for an animal without doing the upfront work. I’m not saying it specifically about Monster Quest but a lot of these shows really bother me, like when it’s a diurnal animal and they go out with night vision cameras, looking for it at night. And they don’t call it by the correct regional name. What’s different about our show is that we’re doing an initial reconnaissance mission. We’re saying. ‘Should science look closer at this creature? Is there real evidence that this is there?’ On the investigations we were doing, if we stumbled across something it would be great but we didn’t go out there with collecting kits. This is more about learning the plausibility of this creature.

Read the full interview here.