Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  If Baker is to be believed, it worked. He found himself unconsciously imitating the movements of a hawk, and the pronouns change from ‘I’ to ‘we’: ‘We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life.’

  No one admires Baker more than I do. But his way is not my way. It can’t be: I don’t have his desperate unhappiness, his desire for self-dissolution or his conviction that the neck-snapping, baby-disembowelling, profligate natural world embodies a morality better than anything humans can devise or follow. As a method, dissolution also creates great literary difficulties. If J. A. Baker really disappears, who is left to tell the story? And if he doesn’t, why should we take the story seriously? Baker seeks to solve this problem by developing (as Robert Macfarlane observes) a new language: wingless nouns stoop and glide; burrow-dwelling verbs somersault on the edge of the atmosphere; adverbs behave disgracefully. I love the strangeness, but it teaches me more about language than about peregrines. Always we’re left with the question: Who’s speaking here? A peregrine given a Cambridge education? Or Baker peregrinised? Because we’re never quite sure, the method never quite convinces. It’s of the nature of poetry that it never quite declares its hand.

  Shamanic transformation possibly aside, there will always be a boundary between me and my animals. It’s as well to be honest about this and try to delineate it as accurately as possible – at least for the sake of coherence. It might be rather prosaic to be able to say of every passage in the book, ‘This is Charles Foster writing about an animal’, rather than ‘This might be a mystical utterance from a man-badger’, but it’s a lot less confusing.

  The method, then, is simply to go as close to the frontier as possible and peer over it with whatever instruments are available. This is a process radically different from simply watching. The typical watcher, huddled with his binoculars in a hide, isn’t concerned with Anaximander’s vertiginous question ‘What does a falcon see?’, let alone with the modern, wider, neurobiological translation of that question: ‘What sort of world does a hawk construct by processing in its brain the inputs from its sense receptors and construing them in the light of its genetic bequests and its own experience?’ These are my questions.

  We can get surprisingly close to the frontier at two points. It is there that I have set up my own hides. These points are physiology and landscape.

  Physiology: Because of our close evolutionary cousinhood, I am, at least in terms of the battery of sense receptors we all bear, quite close to most of the animals in this book. And when I’m not, it is generally possible to describe and (roughly) to quantify the differences.

  Both mammals like me and birds, for instance, use Golgi tendon organs, Ruffini endings and muscle spindles to tell them where the various parts of their bodies are in space, and free nerve endings to scream ‘Horrid!’ or ‘Hot!’ I collect and transmit these types of raw sensory data in a way very similar to that of most mammals and birds.

  By looking at the distribution and density of the various types of receptors, we can work out the type and volume of the inputs to the brain. Look at an oystercatcher stabbing the sand phallically in search of lugworms. On the edge of its bill it has huge numbers of Merkel cells, Herbst corpuscles, Grandry corpuscles, Ruffini endings and free nerve endings. The stabbing sends shock waves through the wet sand, and the network of receptors notes, like a submarine’s sonar, the discontinuities in the returning signal that might indicate the presence of a worm. Some receptors, sensitive to minute vibrations, pick up the scrape of the worm’s bristles on the side of its burrow. This is like nothing in human experience so much as sex. One very good argument against circumcision is that it makes you less like an oystercatcher. The inside of the human prepuce has similar concentrations of Merkel cells and other receptors which are massaged rapturously during sexual intercourse (the poor glans has little except free nerve endings, often buffeted almost to extinction by decades of self-abuse and the attrition of rough trousers). In terms of the naked intensity of signal, estuarine worm hunting by waders is tectonic. It’s like wandering down the food aisles in Sainsbury’s in a state of perpetual tumescence – pushed to the cusp of orgasm when you see the breakfast cereal you’re after.

  Except that it’s not. Everything’s in the central processing. Destroy the cerebral cortex of the horniest German porn star and he’d never have another orgasm. It’s not true that men’s brains are in their trousers. Even the most thoughtless abuser of women only ever has sex in his head. And an oystercatcher only ever feels lugworms in its head.

  So that’s my problem: the weird transformation of signal into action or sensation. The universe I occupy is a creature of my head. It is wholly unique to me. The process of intimacy is the process of becoming better at inviting others in to have a look around. The sensation of loneliness is the crushing acknowledgement that, however good you get at giving such invitations, no one will be able to see very much at all.

  But we need to keep trying. If we give up with humans, we’re wretched misanthropes. If we give up with the natural world, we’re wretched bypass builders or badger baiters or self-referential urbanites.

  There are things we can do. I’ve read lots of physiology books and tried to paint somatotopic pictures of my animals – pictures which present the body parts as having the size justified by their representation in the brain. Humans come out with huge hands, faces and genitals but spindly, wasted torsos. Mice have vast incisors, like the sabre-toothed tiger of a caveman’s worst nightmare, big feet and whiskers like hose pipes.

  We have to be careful about somatotopic pictures: they say nothing about the nature of the processing that goes on, or of the output. They simply say that a lot of hardware is devoted to whiskers – not that a mouse lives in a world that is subjectively dominated by its whiskers. Yet they’re a good start.

  We can draw cautious parallels with our own responses to particular situations.

  Yes, it’s ultimately in the processing, but there is every reason to suppose that when a fox and I step on a piece of barbed wire we ‘experience’ something similar. The inverted commas are important in the case of the fox. I will return to them shortly, but for the moment I mean simply that pain receptors in the fox’s foot and mine fire in a more or less identical way and send electronic impulses along more or less identical tracts in the peripheral and central nervous systems to be processed by the brain, which in each case sends a message to our muscles saying ‘Take that foot off the wire’ – if indeed a reflex hasn’t already achieved that. The brain processing will certainly, in both the fox and me, ingrain the lesson ‘Don’t step on barbed wire: it’s not nice’; this will become a part of the experience which we have genuinely shared. It happened to both of us in a neurologically identical way: we both know what stepping on barbed wire is like, in a way that people and animals who have not stepped on barbed wire do not know. I take it that there are many neurological sequences which it is possible meaningfully to say I share with an animal. If a wind blows down the valley in which we are both lying, we both feel it similarly. It may (it will) import different things for us. For the fox its main significance might be that the rabbits are likely to be grazing in the wood by the horse chestnuts; for me its main significance might be that I’m cold and need to pull on another layer. But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t both felt it. We have. And the differing significance can be deduced by observation.

  We humans tend to denigrate our own sensory lives – to assume that all wild things ‘do’ the wild better than we do. I suspect this is because we want to justify to ourselves our own dismally unsensuous urban lives (‘I have to live in a centrally heated house and get my food in tins because I couldn’t ever live in a tree and catch a squirrel’) and also because it makes a statement about our own supposed cognitive superiority over the animals (‘They smell and hear more acutely than I do because I’ve moved on from such basic, brainstem functions. I don’t need to smell: I think instead, and that’s much more useful’). But
in fact we don’t do so badly at all. Young children often hear sounds of a frequency greater than 20,000 hertz. That’s not so far from a dog (typically 40,000 hertz) and much better than a teal (up to 2,000 hertz) and most fish (generally not much above 500 hertz). And we’re far better than many small mammals at low frequencies. It’s a good reason, were any further reasons needed, not to go to a nightclub. Even our sense of smell, which we normally think of as atrophied by civilisation, is surprisingly (for most) intact. And useful. Three-quarters of people can detect, out of three worn T-shirts, the one they’ve worn. More than half can find that T-shirt out of ten presented to them. Like it or not, we are multimodal sensory animals, in a reasonable position to know something of what is wafted or beamed or vibrated to our cousins in the fields and woods.

  We have, too, a number of advantages. There is the cognitive advantage, which helps us to make allowances for our own cognition and our own physiological differences from the animals and therefore to describe the respects in which we are different and similar. But there are other reasons why a human is better placed to write this book than a meerkat would be. We are good physiological generalists – a result of our omnivorousness: a meerkat would be too olfactorocentric to be a credible author. And we have perspective. When my ancestor on the east African savannah hoisted herself for the first time on to her hind legs it was a journey of far more than a few feet. It was a journey into a new world. She was immediately a creature whose world was framed not by the top of the grass and the baked mud of the ground but by the far horizon and the stars. The Genesis account was suddenly true: she had visual dominion over the things that crept and crawled. She saw them in a way that they did not see her: they looked up to her, and she couldn’t help looking down on them. She saw the connections of their trails through the bush in a way that they did not. She saw their backs, their contexts and the patterns of their lives. In some ways she now saw them better than they saw themselves. This was a consequence simply of bipedalism. Her massively expanded cognition (whether it came then or later) multiplied massively the ways in which this was true.

  Sophisticated cognition lets you generate and test (in the comfort of your own cave, rather than in the scary world of arrow, horn and hoof, where you usually get only one chance) many hypotheses, with many variables, about what the wildebeest will do next week. It requires the writing and running of computer programs. We do it all the time: it’s called thinking. It means that the human hunter is likely to have a better idea than the wildebeest itself about what the wildebeest will be doing on the following Tuesday. One might even say that a successful spear thrust is prima facie evidence that the hunter knows the animal better than it knows itself. My ancestors were extremely successful hunters.

  With cognition (although not merely with raw processing power) comes Theory of Mind – the ability to think oneself into another’s position by a route that is probably different from the what-will-the-wildebeest-do-next-week type of reasoning. Women have more Theory of Mind than men, which makes them nicer people – less prone to start wars or engage in egocentric monologues at the dinner table.

  There’s no reason to restrict Theory of Mind to an ability to put oneself into another’s shoes. It involves too an ability to put oneself into another’s hoofs, pads or fins. Broadly, it is the ability to appreciate the interconnectedness of things – the very thing that brought out the ducking stool and stoked the fires of the medieval witch finders. It’s no surprise that the church burnt far more witches than warlocks, or that witches are more commonly said to have animal familiars, into whose pelts they can readily slip. Shamanic transformation is the natural corollary of highly developed Theory of Mind. If you can think your way into the mind of another species, you can think your way into its skin, and ultimately you’ll see feathers sprouting from your arms or claws springing from your fingers.

  Since the shamans of hunting cultures are crucial to animal finding and animal killing, this will create a conflict within you which can be resolved only by real bereavement and costly ritual. All civilised hunters, bound to their prey by the same Theory of Mind which makes us empathise with our children, mourn the death. It’s dangerous not to do so, says the old wisdom; and the old wisdom is right. The planet, if not its horned gods, will judge our modern ecocide sternly.

  I’ve put down my guns and taken up my tofu, but there was a time when I crept heavily armed through the woods and over the mountains. African antelopes look resentfully down at my laptop as I type this. Every October I caught the train north to stalk red deer in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland. I had a genocidal passion for the roe deer of Somerset and the wildfowl of the Kent salt marshes. My wife used to come out as a rifle rest when I was after rabbits. I bought my daughter a .410 shotgun when she was ten. I whipped in to beagles, rode to foxhounds and staghounds, and had a monthly column in The Shooting Times. My name is in gold-embossed Game Books in some nice country houses. I’ve been photographed smiling next to mounds of dead wood pigeons in Lincolnshire. I’ve fished throughout the night for sea trout in pools on Kintyre, and I can still do the Spey cast I learned when chasing spring salmon on the Royal Dee. I sing ‘Dido, Bendigo’ in pubs, using the inflections I heard at the Rydal Hound Show where I first heard it. I still go to the Game Fair, and still stroke walnut stocks lasciviously.

  I’m embarrassed by all this, and regret a lot of it. It calloused me. Many of the callouses have taken a long time to wear off. But I learned a lot too. I learned to crawl and to lie still and silent. I’ve lain in a stream in Argyllshire for three hours with the water running in through my collar and out through my trousers. I’ve sat in a wood in Bulgaria watching the horseflies queuing up to bite my hand, and in a river in Namibia, where I watched the leeches looping up my ankles en route to my groin. I’ve started many a day on the marshes with my eyes at a mallard’s height above the mud. I know how the shadows from two sycamore branches dance in winter on the Somerset Levels, why the eels leave the River Isle and head across grassland to a rhyne near Isle Abbots, and the difference between the smells of the dung of two roe bucks that live not far from Ilminster.

  It gave me back my senses: a man with a gun sees, hears, smells and intuits much more than the same man with a bird book and a pair of binoculars. It’s as if the death or potential death of an animal flicks on some old, deep switches. Death needs to be in the air for us to be fully alive. Perhaps this is because many hunts, before we started to go with high-velocity weapons after harmless herbivores, carried a serious risk of the hunter dying, and every neurone had to be strained to keep the hunter physically alive. Perhaps it is because death is the one thing that, without any caveats whatever, we will share with the animals; perhaps the first, exhilarating fruit of that perfect reciprocity is an ability to sense the world as the prey does: it sometimes feels as if you’ve got two nervous systems running ecstatically in parallel – yours and the stalked stag’s.

  Hunting rolls back the evolutionary and developmental clocks: you get the senses of your ancestors, which are the senses of your children. All children, if they’re allowed to, hunt all the time. Mine are constantly tracking, scenting, turning over stones and being frankly clairvoyant about where the desired animals are. My oldest son is now eight. He’s known around us as ‘Little Tommy Toad-Catcher’. If you take him into a previously unvisited field he’ll look around for a moment and then walk straight across it – perhaps 200 yards – and lift up a stone. There will be a toad beneath. Ask him how he does it and he says: ‘I just know.’ A few thousand years ago that skill would have either martyred him or made him fat, rich and respected and given him the wives of his choice. If there’s a genetic element to the gift, it would have been selected for strongly. And no doubt it was. The gift lies dormant in many an actuary. It was protected by natural selection much more robustly than the ability to read a balance sheet ever has been or will be. And it can be quickly rekindled in even the most hapless corporate drone.

  We’re hunters
. We can go hunting for pieces of animals’ worlds just as we used to go hunting for their pelts – and using exactly the same skills.

  But our splendid cognition isn’t always helpful in this hunt. It means, for instance, that I get both bored and interested in ways that, presumably, a fox does not.

  Foxes often lie up overground during the day, typically rolling between doze and alertness in a sheltered place. For the fox chapter I did that. My foxes were inner-city foxes, and so I lay in a backyard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was, waiting for the night and treating as hostile the humans in the terraced houses all around – which wasn’t hard.

  It was a useful day: it taught me something about being a fox. But most of what went through my mind was not authentically foxy. I was fascinated by the community of ants that wove its life just in front of my face as I lay prone on the flagstones. I couldn’t stop trying to work out the relationships and wondering how they communicated. Foxes presumably don’t do that. I wondered whether I was smelling turmeric in the saag aloo scent that drifted over the fence; a fox would simply note that there was food in that house and think that the bin might need checking later. And I was bored – desperate for distraction of almost any kind: a book, a conversation, an intrigue.

  Animals do get bored. Or at least relatively bored: a dog in the back of a car would rather be off chasing rabbits. But I doubt that the stress of complete non-event is quite as debilitating for them as it is for me. Perhaps they never have such stress. Perhaps there is always the perceived possibility of annihilation, sex or food to give piquancy to their long, wakeful days. I, lying in my own dung in London E3, was variously less or more realistic about those possibilities, and it was hell.