Animal instinct

Being a Beast. By Charles Foster. Profile; 218 pages; £14.99. To be published in America by Metropolitan in June, $28.

STRIDING around describing plants and animals, often in flowery prose from behind a desk or a camera lens, seems rather old-fashioned. In “Being a Beast” Charles Foster takes a more modern approach, getting down to the animal’s level to see what it is really like to be a badger, an otter, a fox, a red deer and a swift.

It is an extreme proposition. Mr Foster, a writer and barrister who qualified as a vet and has a PhD in medical law and ethics from Cambridge, doesn’t just investigate the taxonomical differences with humans; he attempts to overcome them. This means eating rubbish from bin bags as an urban fox would do, living in a sett as a badger, cowering naked on a moor as a red deer and launching himself fully clothed into a river pretending to be an otter.

Mr Foster is a nature writer, but not one you would recognise. There is plenty of shit and blood and dirt and very little description of the beauty of the animals. Because who needs to read that? Readers know that a badger is handsome. What they do not know is what worms taste like. Since you ask, it’s like wine apparently: once you get past the slime, each worm has its own individual terroir.

Mr Foster shapeshifts with the book. In the badger chapter he is sensuous yet ruthless. As an otter he has ADHD. As a fox he is a canine kind of street smart. And as a swift? Suddenly transcendent. The book contains some very funny moments, usually involving other humans who are confused as to why a man is sleeping under a shed, eating spiders or growling at a dog.

But to dismiss Mr Foster as an eccentric would be a mistake. In each chapter the reader learns a lot about the animals involved. What does it feel like to sleep by a road, hunt voles or be hunted by hounds? The author hones senses long neglected. As a badger he maps the dark wood by smells alone, as an otter he sees the river through a thousand tiny bubbles, and as a fox he slinks into a new city of London defined by dark corners and rubbish dumps.

The idea that people should stop managing the landscape and let the wild back into their tired lives has gained so much in popularity it now goes by the buzzword “rewilding” in conservation circles. Mr Foster is the real thing, going truly feral and in the process discovering a whole new world. It is not a midlife crisis so much as a lifelong passion.

Yet no matter how hard he tries, poor Charles Foster is such a very human homo sapiens. He cannot escape being a middle-aged man. It is like watching a geek with the cool kids at a party, trying to assume the character of a cunning fox or a confident badger. He has moments, like when he discovers the joy of chasing a cat or earthworms emerging after the rain. But in the end, he is too clumsy, too bipedal—and altogether too intellectual.

A streak of eastern mysticism runs through Mr Foster’s book. In the end he listens to its call and lets rip. This is the moment when he becomes a swift, allowing his writing and his thoughts to fly and “slash the veil”, as he calls it. He believes that the closest he can get to being a swift is to understand the finer details of the planet he shares with the bird: “The velvet flow of a caterpillar’s legs and the grunt of a crocus as it noses out of the earth.”

Finally, the author accepts that he is human, which is all about being curious and pushing boundaries. This idea is not new. Attempting to connect to animals and even become them has been tested over generations, not least as shamans and through stories, such as “Homeward Bound”. What is new is the modern world that humans have created full of cars and houses and computers, where “sensitivity is impossible”. It would be all too easy to mock the author’s commitment to recognising his atavistic abilities and releasing his inner animal. But curiosity prevails. “Being a Beast” wastes no time telling you how to identify nature or become a better person. It encourages you to get down on your hands and knees and start sniffing.