The cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser once said, “The world of experience is produced by the man who experienced it.” The same is true for all creatures. We construct our private worlds of subjective experience according to the information our senses are attuned to. The human world represents only one of all the different animal worlds. So: What is it like — what is it really like — to be another creature? What is it like to see, smell, hear, taste and feel the world as they do? What is our world like — what are we like — to another? Our guest, the extraordinarily imaginative writer and explorer Dr. Charles Foster, wanted to find out.
(Photo courtesy of Charles Foster)
So, Dr. Foster got down on all fours and tried his best to do just that, picking five types of animals close to home to try to inhabit. He lived as a Welsh badger for six weeks in the woods, eating earthworms, digging an underground den, sleeping in it during the day, and navigating by scent on his hands and knees at night. As an urban fox, he curled up in backyards in London’s East End and pawed through garbage cans for dinner scraps. As an Exmoor otter, he caught fish with his teeth and attempted to differentiate bowel movements with his nose. As a red deer, he let his toenails grow like overgrown hooves and was hunted by bloodhounds. And as a common swift, he followed the birds’ migration across Europe and into West Africa. In addition to immersing himself in these animals’ physical worlds, Dr. Foster immersed himself deeply in the physiological literature about these non-human ways of life. He recounts his adventures in non-humanness in his spectacularly imaginative, unorthodox, truly hilarious, daring, and award-winning book, Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide, which The New York Times called “intensely strange and terrifically vivid … an eccentric modern classic of nature writing.”
Dr. Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. In addition to being a best-selling author, he is a trained veterinary surgeon and a practicing barrister, and teaches medical law and ethics at Oxford. He has spent much of his life on expeditions of the mind and the body — such as running a 150-mile race in the Sahara desert and skiing to the North Pole — and has written books on travel, evolutionary biology, natural history, anthropology, theology, archaeology and philosophy. Ultimately, he says, his work all attempts to answer the questions: “Who or what are we, and what on earth are we doing here?”
(Photo courtesy of Charles Foster)
Recommended books:
Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
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