This programme is the modern electronic equivalent of Roman games.
People undergo discomfort and humiliation for the entertainment of the masses - the same primeval notions that drove the Romans to seek this level of entertainment, still drives us today.
I am old enough to remember the late Clive James introducing us to the Japanese game show 'Endurance' where contestants did very similar things to IAC, and we all gawped and marveled, not only at what Japanese people will watch, but what people will go through to be on television.
And now, here we are 'civilized ' Westerners, doing and watching the same thing we mocked the Japanese for doing and watching.
These shows are based on deprivation, and the effects it has on people - usually not positive, which is what makes for what is rather amusingly referred to as 'good television'.
I personally feel that it is a less active - in the sense that it is beamed into our homes - equivalent of popping down to Bedlam on a Sunday to gawp at the lunatics through the bars.
Add to that the random and wholesale cruelty to dumb animals whose only fault is an absence of physical attraction, and the means to express pain and fear, and the whole thing loos less appealing the more you think about it.
We get the TV we deserve, and the ratings of this freak show say more about us as individuals, than any of the cash-seeking egotists who take part in such demeaning behaviour.