'Shark After Dark' Host Eli Roth Denounces The 'Disgusting' Killing Of Sharks For Soup

Eli Roth is a master of blood and gore when it comes to directing horror on the big screen, but his experience with sharks has been quite the opposite. In fact, the host of "Shark After Dark," Discovery Channel's Shark Week late-night talk show, said he's found that the animals we usually see portrayed as ferocious beasts are actually more like puppies.

That's why he's so upset by the way humans treat sharks in the wild. Roth explained to HuffPost Live's Josh Zepps on Wednesday that in his interviews with shark specialists, he found that people hurt sharks a lot more than sharks hurt them.

"Humans have decimated the shark supply. Think about this: There are probably five people annually in the entire planet that die from sharks. Humans kill 100 million sharks annually, and you know what for? Shark fin soup," Roth said. "It's disgusting. They call it fish fin soup, but it's shark fin soup. And boots -- cowboy boots. That's what we're using the sharks for. So in the last 20 years, nine-tenths of the ocean's shark population has been killed by humans, and we're turning them into soup when the function of sharks is to actually keep the ocean healthy."

Watch Roth discuss the importance of shark conservation in the video above, and click here for his full HuffPost Live conversation.

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