Knowing ourselves and other animals

This winter I finally got around to reading Charles Foster’s book Being a Beast, which had been recommended to me in the strongest terms. I have never been good at following advice of any kind, nor have I ever been a great fan of nature writing – but I am at least aware that both these things make me a bad person, and that I should try to be better. So eventually I took a crack at it, and was glad I did.

The book, originally published in 2016, is about Foster’s attempt to understand what it is actually like to be a wild animal. “Every organism creates a different world in its brain. It lives in that world,” he writes. The challenge he presents himself is to gain access, or at least partial access, to some of those other worlds.

He sees this as part of the ancient tradition of shamanism, through which humans have sought to cross the species boundary, to acquire animal knowledge. But he’s not hoping for some mystical transformation. His intention is “simply to go as close to the frontier as possible and peer over it.”

In some respects, the gap is not so large. The author notes that in addition to sharing much of our DNA with other animals, we have many of the same physiological tools for experiencing our environment. On the other hand, we’re far from equal in this regard. “Their sensory receptors give animals a hugely bigger palette of colours with which to paint the land than that possessed by any human artist,” he writes. “The intimacy with which animals relate to the land gives them an authority in their painting far greater than can be assumed even by a farmer whose ancestors have turned over every clod since the Neolithic.”

Nonetheless, he decides it’s worth a try. In part, it’s an attempt to offer an alternative to conventional nature writing, which “has generally been about humans striding colonially around, describing what they see from six feet above the ground.” The two main pitfalls, he says, are anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism.

“I have tried to avoid both of those sins, and of course I have failed.”

But it is a noble and exuberant failure. Foster limits himself to five animals that inhabit five distinct types of habitat: the badger, the otter, the fox, the Red deer, and the swift. In fact, he narrows his focus to a particular population of each species. He’s aiming for specificity.

His approach is to immerse himself – physically – in each animal’s world. It’s so kooky, perhaps only an eccentric Englishman could pull it off. Foster is Cambridge-educated, well-travelled, widely published, qualified as both a lawyer and a veterinarian, and fully aware of his privilege. He is apparently unafraid of looking silly, and this affords him a unique kind of scholarly freedom.

In his introductory remarks, he acknowledges that this project is wildly ambitious. He asks rhetorically, “Was I describing anything other than the inside of my own head?” He confesses that he could not really get at the true nature of his chosen animals. “I’m sorry,” he says, setting a tone of modesty that is no less charming for being false.

Foster’s chapter on badgers is set in the Black Mountains in Wales – not because badgers make up a particularly significant part of this region’s fauna, but because the author’s old friend Burt has a farm there, and a JCB digger that is used to excavate a trench which is then covered with branches and sealed over with earth to mimic a badger “sett,” as their tunnel networks are called. The author takes along his eight-year-old son, and the two of them settle in for long enough to become truly nocturnal – sleeping in their earthen burrow in the daytime, and walking on all fours when they venture out at night. They even eat earthworms, which make up 85 percent of the badger’s diet. Foster describes this form of nourishment as having “a very distinct terroir.”

Man and boy strain to smell the world as badgers would, and try to make a “scent map” of their surroundings. Eventually they get better at it, and they believe they have acquired some semblance of a badger’s sense of place, though they recognize that their bodies are ill equipped for it. Burt is dismissive of the whole charade, but takes pity on them and brings offerings of human food.

After this highly unhygienic experiment, Foster finds the return to an urban environment quite jarring. “The town blared, belched, leered, and cackled,” he writes. “The scent blocks were huge and crass; they lurched and swung and bellowed. I felt sick from the shock and boredom and the heaving floors of deafening smell.”

To experience the lives of otters, the author goes to Exmoor, in southwestern England – specifically the waters of the East Lyn River and its tributaries, which eventually flow out to the Bristol Channel. This chapter is comical from the start because Foster dispenses with objectivity and declares his dislike for the species. He says otters have an unusually high metabolic rate, so they must devote most of their waking hours to “frenetic killing.” They are also known to fight among themselves, inflicting horrific injuries on each other. He says they are “too consumed by the desire to consume to have anything spare for the construction of a self.”

Of course, this is not the otters’ fault. Foster suggests that their desperation is partly due to the fact that river pollution has decimated populations of eels, which make up 80 percent of the ideal otter diet. He points out that some of the chemical contamination comes from sheep wading into the water after they have been dipped. Though he holds otters in disdain, he clearly has a deep fondness for rivers, and his descriptions of this environment sometimes lean toward the lyrical rather than the scientific.

There is more empiricism in his discussion of “spraiting,” the territorial defecation behaviour of otters. Foster makes his own contribution to the scatological literature by recruiting his children to poop along a riverbank, then testing whether their respective markings can be identified by smell. (The answer is yes, “about 80 percent of the time.”)

He also spends a lot of time trying to track otters. He finds them elusive, and he resents this, but he makes a valiant effort to inhabit their habitat, spending many hours in the river. An otter’s head, with its distinctive whiskers attached to a great many nerve endings, is “like a perpetually engorged glans, pushing desperately into the world, seeking always more sensation,” Foster says. He finds his own face to be sensorily lacking, and even prone to numbness in cold water. Despite the wetsuit he wears, which has insulative qualities comparable to an otter’s double-layer coat, in winter he cannot endure the icy river. Again, he acknowledges his failure. “You should ask for 25 percent off the price of this book,” he writes.

To explore the world of foxes, we are not taken to the woods or the fields, but to the streets of East End London, where the author lived for many years. Again, his subjectivity intrudes. For one thing, he is sour about the gentrification of his old stomping grounds. For another, he has been fascinated by foxes since childhood, and is incapable of overcoming his sentimental attachment to them. They are “relational, empathic creatures,” he insists. “And you can shout ‘Beatrix Potter’ as loudly as you like: I don’t care.”

The life of an urban fox involves a lot of foraging for pizza crusts and discarded carryout curry, so Foster adopts this behaviour. The grubbier he looks, the less attention he attracts scavenging among the garbage – though this doesn’t always work out. There is a pretty funny account of his confrontation with a policeman who discovers him sleeping in the rhododendrons. There’s also an interesting explanation of how foxes use magnetic fields to measure distance, for the purpose of pouncing upon voles. The author tries this hunting technique, and fails, of course.

Foster is amazed that foxes, with their acute sense of hearing, can tolerate the horrible cacophony of city noises. “They flaunt their thriving in conditions that are objectively wretched,” he says. “They don’t want my loud, tree-hugging sermons on their behalf, and I feel not only miffed but mystified. They are the true citizens of the world.”

For his discussion of Red deer, Foster takes us back to Exmoor, and also to Scotland’s Western Highlands. Considering how wild game is associated with class and economics in Great Britain, there’s a lot to unpack here. His accounts of hunting excursions are clever sociological set pieces, skewering the pretentious culture of “stalkers.”

He says it took him a long time to acknowledge the gravity of hunting, “because no one, and least of all me, is morally consistent, and because I was having too much fun.” He quit when he finally saw it in political terms – as representing the dynamics of a society divided into predators and prey: “When I’d seen children ridden down by shareholders or wounded and left to die by CEOs, and death creeping sneakily up the glen to within rifle shot of my own family, I was ready to make the connection.”

In hopes of gaining new insight into the lives of deer, Foster spends a considerable amount of time pretending to be one, stripped naked and covered in mud as he traverses their territory. Reviewing his notes of these experiences, trying in vain to find the true essence of the animal, he only finds different reflections of himself. “I was deep in the waters of anthropomorphic whimsy,” he writes, “and sinking fast.”

Lastly, Foster turns his attention to swifts. His setting for this chapter is “the air between Oxford and central Africa,” which is a lot of territory – which is kind of the point. The annual migration of swifts entails a journey of 9,000 kilometres, but Foster calculates that altogether they fly about 48,000 kilometres a year – remaining airborne not just for days or weeks, but sometimes for months.

Foster says the aerial habitat occupied by birds is far more dynamic and far more biodiverse than we perceive it to be – filled with seeds and insects pulled up from the ground. “In a wood or above a field, the vortices are an unseen forest of tangled chimneys,” he says. “At the top of the treeline there’s a tangled delta. The chimneys swell, start to knot, and spill into a flat bowl which spins them together. The flotsam gathers pace; the streams are wider and denser.”

This is where the swifts feed, “catching 5,000 or more insects a day.” He climbs trees in order to occupy the same space, and even tries parachuting. But can he become a swift? “I may as well try to be God,” he says.

Foster cannot believe that the behaviour of these birds is entirely bound by instinct and evolutionary imperative, because sometimes it resembles pure joy. He refers to them “doing thermodynamically fatuous things just for the screaming, exulting, rapturous hell of it.” His interest in swifts becomes an obsession – one he indulges further in his 2021 book The Screaming Sky, which I hope to get my hands on soon.

Being a Beast is a peculiar mixture of arrogance and humility. It is irreverent, impolite, sometimes profound, and often hilarious. Though it contains a great deal of information about animals, it is essentially an exploration of the self and the other. “Our capacity for vicariousness is infinite,” Foster insists, and he says this gives him hope. Ultimately, it is about loving life, which may be all any of us can aspire to. DL