[As someone posturing daily as a Silverback gorilla trying to establish a worldwide community of great apes, I empathize with this guy. In fact I had a banana for breakfast and plan on a salad for lunch. That’s how committed I am to being a real life Silverback. And I’m always protecting my harem (of one). SB SM]
The barrister who became a badger: why did Charles Foster decide to live like an animal?
He ate earthworms as a badger, tore open binbags as an urban fox, and was hunted by a bloodhound as a deer.
“I have become The Man Who Eats Worms,” Charles Foster shrugs, sorrowfully. “It’s not really a very interesting subject. It doesn’t tell you anything about how badgers experience the world.”
This combination of self-deprecation and a quest for deeper purpose is what defines Foster, the 53-year-old barrister and Oxford medical tutor who decided to shed his professional human trappings and live like an animal.
It also defines the book he has written about his experiences, called Being a Beast – a wild blend of nature writing, memoir, philosophy and scientific study.
A copy sits on his dining room table, nestled among sheet music and exercise books. Foster lives in this treasure trove of a house near the centre of Oxford – bedecked with stuffed animals as well as children’s collages and paintings – with his wife Mary, who is a GP, and their four young children.
The beady eyes of fox heads peer at visitors who arrive in the hall. A glaring otter surveys the kitchen worktop. Across the room, a gull perches, suspended, beside Foster’s conservatory-cum-study, which has a view of a leafless tree. Everywhere you look is a jumble of earthy miscellany – boots and globes and veterinary magazines. It’s probably closer to being a wilderness than most suburban terraces.
As he clatters around making coffee, Foster looks momentarily devastated when I admit – as a lifelong Londoner – to not being particularly outdoorsy.
“We all live in the wild,” he says. “We are necessarily wild animals, even if we choose to wear clothes instead of skins.”
But Foster wanted to go further, dropping from his height of 6ft 3in to the ground to live like, and among, the animals.
Eating earthworms, licking slugs and scuffling around on all fours – noses to the ground – he and his then eight-year-old son (or cub) Tom lived nocturnally for six weeks as badgers in a Welsh wood; his farmer friend dug out a sett for them in the hillside with a JCB.
In the East Lyn river, Foster thrashed around as an otter, catching the occasional unlucky fish in his mouth, and failing to notice a leech attached to his lip for an hour as his face numbed from the cold. The winter depressed him, and his jacket was stolen from the riverbank. His otter experience was not his highlight.
He had more luck as an urban fox in London’s East End, where he slept in backyards, prowled the streets, and rooted around people’s bins, eating leftovers he covered in mixed spices to avoid the taste of strangers’ saliva.
Foster used to live in the East End, but he didn’t like it much and moved to Oxford seven years ago. Foxes proved better Londoners than he was. “The foxes showed me a London that was old and deep enough to live in and be kind about,” he writes. “They negotiated an uneasy peace between me and the East End.”
But they weren’t all good. One vixen stole a chicken leg from him – a moment he delighted in, finding it his most authentic experience as an animal. “There was that eye-to-eye connection, in which, fancifully or otherwise, I thought there was reciprocity,” he recalls. “There was that I-thou relationship, which all my theory about the natural world has told me, but it’s often difficult to feel.”
Foster also paraglided to be closer to the swifts he so admires, and attempted to be hunted as a red deer in Exmoor. His friend set a bloodhound on him. Foster tore across a field and through a wood, only for the dog to catch up, take one look at him, and turn away back to its master.
It’s difficult to imagine Foster’s adventures on this cosy weekday morning, chatting to him over coffee with his donnish persona, woolly jumper and jeans, just before he heads in to college.
“It upsets me very much,” he sighs, when I bring up how his academic life contradicts his animal ambitions. “I’m being hypocritical in sitting at a table and drinking out of a china cup.”
Indeed, Foster calls his book “an admission of failure” to achieve his aim, which is to relate to nature and our animal ancestors on a sensory – rather than cognitive – level.
He believes humans are “trapped into a visual way of looking at the world”, and derides nature writing as “a colonial enterprise” in which we impose our gaze on the land. He describes the “outrage” and “arrogance” he felt when he reverted to standing upright after six weeks as a badger. “It seemed presumptuous,” he sighs.
Foster was once one of the humans he now wishes had more empathy with nature. He used to hunt and shoot voraciously. Every winter, he stalked deer in the Highlands. He shot wildfowl in Kent. He bought his daughter a shotgun when she was ten, and wrote a monthly column in The Shooting Times.
“The fact that I did it when there was no nutritional justification is something of which I am now very ashamed,” he admits. “But the reason I took up hunting was because I wanted to continue to have that relationship with the natural world which I had experienced in its greatest intimacy when I was a child.”
As a young boy growing up in Sheffield, Foster kept nature diaries and became obsessed with a blackbird in the back garden. He seems envious of how much closer – “literally! They’re closer to the ground” – children are to animals, and “worries sick” about his children “unlearning everything” they sense about nature.
But Foster is more of a campaigner than the whimsical naturalist he is in Being a Beast. His purpose has become more political since it was published.
“We act towards the natural world with a lack of empathy, which, were we to express ourselves like that towards humans, would be regarded as frankly psychopathic,” he laments.
“I would like people to think, when they’re about to bite into their steak, is this tantamount to cannibalism? This steak is part of the buttock of a fairly near relative.”
Being a Beast by Charles Foster is published by Profile Books.
Wed 3 Feb 2016
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018
A review of Being a Beast:
Worms from the Chablis region of France, when chewed, have a long, mineral finish. Worms from Picardy are apparently musty, like splintered wood. Worms from the high Kent Weald are fresh and uncomplicated. And worm flavours change with the season as well as the region: Norfolk worms have a tang of nappy liner in August, but paraffin in January.
When I reached this exploration of the terroir of worms a short way into Charles Foster’s strikingly funny and profound book, I wondered if I was being had. Here, surely, was the ultimate parody of the nature writer’s lament that we are disastrously estranged from the wild world.
Being a Beast has a terrific premise: Foster seeks to live as a badger, an otter, a fox, stag and swift, in order to better understand their lives and ours. From a distance, it resembles a stunt, but this elegantly written execution of the challenge is both sincere and self-mocking, flippant and deadly serious.
The worm-munching is because they constitute the bulk of a British badger’s diet, and Foster heads to Wales to begin life as a badger, accompanied by his eight-year-old son, Tom. A JCB-driving farmer friend helps them dig a sett in a hillside and they take up residence.
In seeking to unite human and animal worlds, Foster is aware he is following an ancient shamanistic tradition. But he rejects the idea of a modern-day shaman who sets up shop in a festival tepee and believes he can jump into the body of another being with a modest spot of meditation: any attempt to shed our human skin requires a lot of legwork, or “wingwork”. He is also critical of the “quasi-shamanism” of JA Baker in his classic book The Peregrine, whereby Baker obsessively pursued some falcons until he suggested he had become one.
In contrast, Foster believes there is always a boundary between himself and animals. He seeks to peer over it by exploring physiology and the way his quarry (he is a repentant country sportsman) use the landscape and share it with humans. What unfolds is not “an ecstatic utterance from a man-badger” but a slog, and Foster is constantly aware of falling short.
There are plenty of opportunities for squeamish giggles as Badger-Foster and his cub devour worms and lap “from a pool where leeches waved at our lips”. Yet his approach also produces insight into the lifestyles – and emotions – of animals. Even trivial experiences are revealing. He notices how Tom sniffs in fast bursts: it’s called odour sampling, and is exactly what scent-reliant mammals do.
Tom proves a better badger than his dad. He swims breaststroke through the grass, insists he can hear a woodpecker’s tongue in tree bark – “Imagine a nail file whispering” – and detects bank vole runs with his nose. Foster’s feelings of failure, “the Puck of otherness had dodged away”, shift when he returns to Abergavenny and realises the transformative nature of his experience. “The town blared, belched, leered and cackled. There was more variegation on one leaf outside our setts than there was in the whole place,” he writes. “I felt sick from shock and boredom and the heaving floors of deafening smell.”
There are plenty of opportunities for squeamish giggles as Badger-Foster and his cub devour worms
His failure in trying to be a badger is magnificent, but his attempt to become an otter is hampered by his contempt for the species; and his passages about the red deer are more about his own stalking follies and an act of repentance: having bloodhounds turned on him. However, Foster’s attempt to live like an urban fox – he forages in bins and sleeps in gardens – is superbly revealing, of modern people (“In a few generations we’ve turned into sclerosed super-specialists, each in a niche so tight that our limbs can’t stretch and our brains can’t turn”) and modern Vulpes vulpes. Foster shows this most familiar of animals in a joyfully new light: consider that the urban fox we see slinking across the street almost certainly has fractured bones, fused joints and arthritis. “When they walk along fence tops like teenage Olympic Romanians on the beam, or blast from a hedge on to a wood pigeon, or seep like mercury up to a rabbit, they’re doing it with a back so bad that, were they office workers, it would have them signed permanently off work.”
Foster is a worthy heir to an eccentric tradition of English environmental writing exemplified by Roger Deakin. “Wetsuits are condoms that prevent your imagination from being fertilised by mountain rivers,” sounds just like Deakin. He and Foster share wit, learning worn lightly and a charming presence throughout their books. Foster’s self-criticism is sincerely felt, I’m sure, and might also serve to disarm potential critics.
I had hoped that his final attempt at being beastly would find him spending a summer under grimy eaves in Oxford, following David Lack’s classic Swifts in a Tower, but he wisely doesn’t. There is no moment of transcendence but swifts nevertheless provide Foster with a manifesto: we must feel wonder and share habits. Wonder, he argues, comes from an attention to detail: “Only those blind to the velvet flow of a caterpillar’s legs and deaf to the grunt of a crocus as it noses out of the earth don’t worship.” Amazing swifts are still subject to the same laws of nature as us. “We share a jurisdiction and hence a passport. We can live together; we can travel together; we already have some shared habits, and we can work on acquiring more.”
Illuminating and unfailingly entertaining, this book is a tour de force of modern nature writing, and shows us how to better love the world beyond ourselves.