Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  We piled into Burt’s Land Rover, drove off, drove back to pick up and tie on the rear bumper, went to a pie shop to fill ourselves up with meat from condemned cows (since we weren’t looking forward to earthworms) and went to the farm.

  It was in Burt’s kitchen, years before, that I had first started to reflect seriously on the possibility of being another animal. This was not because he lives as an amphibian, slopping happily between humanness and animality: I have long known that to be the case. It’s a lot of his charm. Nor because his kitchen is a continually shifting border between wilderness and Peppa Pig. It is because his wife, Meg, is a witch.

  In the nicest possible way. She sticks pins into people to help them, rather than into wax models of people to harm them. But she has the same notions of the interconnectedness of things that in Merrie England would have sent her up in flames.

  Burt is a familiar rather than a husband; a companion from across one of those arbitrary species boundaries; shaggy, lolloping and happy enough with his leg in a gin trap.

  Burt and I met fifteen years ago in the Sahara, on the Marathon des Sables, which he was running in Green Flash tennis shoes. I rubbed iodine into what was left of his feet, and he invited me to his farm.

  He was born in this valley and then lisped his way out to diamond mines in Namibia, to Cambridge, to veterinary clinics in Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Gaza and then into Meg’s magnificent knickers and the shearing shed.

  Their kitchen is a crossing place. The hill bleeds into the carpet. There’s a Bronze Age axe head next to the PC. The Tibetan Book of the Dead leans against Jamie Oliver. There’s a cauldron of hallucinogenic herbs by the chicken nuggets.

  Meg took it for granted that I, or anyone, could be an animal.

  ‘In all civilised cultures, people are doing it all the time. The shamans shuttle to and fro between their bodies and the bodies of bears, crows or whatever. You want to fly? There are dozens of cocktails that will give you wings. There are some recipes there.’ She gestured to the bookshelf.

  ‘You want to be a fox? It just takes a bit of practice in a darkened room with a candle and a chicken. These creatures are, after all, just a few evolutionary years upstream of us. There are boats that can go fast against the stream; I know some of the boatmen. Or, if you’re smart, you can reverse the flow.’

  I didn’t doubt it then, and I certainly don’t now. Though I wanted it, I feared it. But I didn’t fear physiology books or the business of empathy. I wanted to see how far into a badger’s skin they could take me.

  ✴ ✴

  I planned to burrow into the side of a flat-topped mountain. On the top of the mountain, men used to kill their children. Badgers don’t do that; they know that dogs, trucks, TB and starvation will harvest whatever the gods need.

  Scree falls from the infanticidal sanctuary, and then, when the land curves out, grass starts to cling to the stone, and then the grass gives way to desperate clumps of bracken and finally, near the river, to oak, ash, beech and elder. The elders come for the water, and the badgers come for the elders: they eat the berries like kids eat crisps, their shit is knobbly with the seeds, and so the elders and the badgers travel together. You often find badger setts near water, but that’s because of the elders; I’ve never seen badgers drink at a river (although they must), and they’ve never learned to scoop out fish with those hook-feet of theirs. They seem to get most of their water from the earthworms.

  This river rises in a sullen swamp of cotton grass and sphagnum, which doesn’t deserve the bubbling enthusiasm of its curlews. It takes the water five miles to start to stutter out the curlews’ bubbles. By the time it hits the badger valley the river has learned a lot and has many voices and much conversation. Many living things, with very different ears, come to listen and to talk. The badgers wouldn’t be there otherwise. Conversational and dietary monoculture are as deadly for them as for us. Badgers can’t live on curlews; they eat ecosystems.

  There’s every reason to suppose that they were in this valley long before the Bronze Age child killers. There are some great badger fortresses here; tangled labyrinths which hollow out the hill so that it would ring like a bodhrán if one of the dark gods stamped in disgust at the taste of a child.

  The population is ancient and isolated; they won’t have had the chatty commerce of lowland badgers. Travelling boars, frustrated in their search for a mate back home, can’t have reached this redoubt very often. The DNA went round and round, getting sick and dizzy over the centuries. One of the skulls in a heap of spoil had a weirdly undershot jaw; another a sagittal crest like a cockatoo. Some of the footprints along the badger paths had six or seven toe marks.

  The skulls are in the spoil because badgers often die underground, in the midst of their families, and are buried there. Their bodies often cause a new kink in the tunnel. Grandma’s body determines the geography of the next few generations. We dump our dead beyond the outer ring road, where they won’t interfere with the way we live.

  ✴ ✴

  I cheated. I’d thought of enlarging a disused badger sett, but I wasn’t confident of persuading the police that I wasn’t badger digging, and I didn’t like the idea of inhaling, along with the good earth of Mid Wales, a huge dose of TB bacilli. And then there was my wife, who rightly expected any hole I dug to collapse in on Tom, which would have created lots of paperwork. The JCB couldn’t give us a tunnel – just a deep trench scored into the hill. But it worked very well. We covered the roof with branches and bracken, sealed it with earth and had our sett. Burt chugged off down the valley for fishcakes and Sesame Street and left us to it. We wriggled inside and tried to be a bit more authentic.

  Although many setts are echoing labyrinths, coiling like a bundle of earthworms deep around rocks and roots, some are not. The simplest sort, dug as temporary shelters, are single tunnels. Like the medieval gates which turn through right angles to prevent a rush of invaders getting any momentum, they turn, a metre or so from the entrance, push on for a bit and then bell out at the far end, where there’s a sleeping chamber. That’s what ours was like. We shaped it with our paws and with a child’s beach spade (ideal for working in small spaces). We tried to scuffle out the earth with our hind legs but couldn’t, because the ceiling was authentically low (most setts are roughly semicircular in profile, being wider than they’re high). Tom could pull the bracken bedding in backwards, like proper badgers always do, but it was too much for me. And we sneezed: constantly, mightily and unbadgerishly. Badgers seem to have some sort of muscular sphincter just before the entrance to the nostrils that they can close up when they’re digging to stop the earth getting in. But we haven’t, and in that dry July, at least at the top of the tunnel, it was terrible. When they’re hunting snufflingly through the world, nose to the ground, badgers of course can’t use that merciful sphincter: they need the scent to reach their nostrils. And then they blast out the dust in heavy snorts. That, between sneezes, is what we did as we excavated. Tom was filling tissues with silica and blood for a week.

  We used head torches. Badgers have more photoreceptive rods in their retinas than we do and have a reflective layer in their eyes, called a tapetum, which makes their eyes shine in car headlights and which bounces uncollected photons back into the retina. Badgers squeeze more light from their world into their brains than we do. The world gives them the same; they do more with it. The near dark of our midday tunnel would have been dazzling to them.

  It was hard work, but eventually we were done. We crawled down to the river, lapped from a pool where leeches waved at our lips, and crawled back to our chamber, where we fell asleep, side by side and head to toe, as all good badgers do. It makes the best use of the space. Tom always moved in the night. ‘Feet in the face aren’t friendly’, he said.

  I dreamt: the florid, in-your-face dreams that lie just beneath consciousness. The sort of dreams you get in the tropics, when things in green and gold dance to the beat of the ceiling fan. Here, though, the beat was Tom’s heart
against my head, and the tune was the low hum of the hill and the girl’s voice of the river.

  I don’t doubt for a moment that badgers have some sort of consciousness. One of the reasons is that I’ve seen them sleeping. There’s plainly something going on in their heads when they’re asleep. They paddle, yip and snarl; the full repertoire of expressions plays out on their faces. There is some sort of story being enacted. And what can the central character be but the badger’s self? The misty land of sleep is where our own selves, so often suppressed, denied and violated, walk proud and have an uninterrupted voice.

  It’s no doubt true that the dreaming badger is processing data from the day or night just gone; is trying out, for evolutionarily obvious reasons, the way in which it might, in the light of the new data, respond to future challenges. But this dry formulation doesn’t elbow out the self: far from it. The self is the substrate of the concerns that are being addressed.

  I’ve often thought that sleep must be doing something like a defragmentation program on a computer. Files are being shifted from where the day has dumped them to the cabinets from which they can be more easily extracted. When I self-hypnotise, my eyelids flicker in hypnotism’s emulation of rapid eye movement sleep, and the flickering is just like the flickering of the little red light when the defrag program is running. Indeed, I can feel the defrag. But the analogy is not complete. A defrag program doesn’t need a story. Sleeping badgers have stories, and stories need subjects.

  What might it mean for an unconscious creature to dream? Indeed to sleep at all? What’s being lost when ‘consciousness’ is lost? What accompanies the creature into the world beyond the veil? If badgers aren’t conscious in a sense comparable to us, their sleeping smiles and winces are more inscrutable than consciousness itself. I prefer the lesser mystery.

  ✴ ✴

  We awoke in stages (or became more evenly awake, since the wild won’t usually abandon you utterly to unconsciousness: there’s too much happening), to the rattling of a jay and, more fully, to the growling of an engine. It was Burt, with fish pie.

  ‘Bogus, I know, but I won’t tell anyone.’

  In fact, it wasn’t bogus at all. Badgers are the ultimate opportunistic omnivores. No badger would turn up its nose at fish pie.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, though’, he went on. ‘To compensate, I’ll come down later and set the dogs on you. And then we’ll go up to the road and I’ll try to run you over.’

  Yes, very amusing. Yet the point was serious. I’d tended to think that a badger’s life was painted in the colours of the wood. These colours I could hope to see too. But there was a darker colour there – the colour of fear. You see that colour – a pale electric blue in my mind’s eye – on the edges of bristling fur when a badger stops on its path through the fern, having got a nose full of human stench, and around the tips of straining ears as it hears a dog that’s slightly nearer than the usual farm dog.

  By killing all the wolves, we have appointed ourselves as the badger’s prime tormentor. If badgers do dream, we appear in their worst nightmares – unless they revert in sleep to the distant times when wolves hunted badgers down to a final snarling stand against the bole of an oak. Memories live a long time in wild heads. Red deer panic wildly if you let them sniff lion dung, although it’s been millennia since lions were a worry.

  In fact, I doubt that badgers dream of wolves. Badgers have altered their lives significantly to take account of their wolf-lessness, and I’d expect their psyches to follow their behaviour. Where there are wolves (in the more howling parts of eastern Europe, for instance), badgers aren’t the bustlingly communal animals they are here. There aren’t the big ancestral palaces in well-drained hillsides. Instead, badgers live in smaller, more intimate, less playful units. If there are wolves out there, badgers tend to take nervous, prudent, straight-line journeys, which reduces the amount of foraging and so reduces the number of badgers an area can hold. True, big setts are convenient for psychopaths with pit bulls, but psychopaths are less efficient predators than wolves, and they don’t like to stray too far from roads. Wales can be vile to badgers, but it’s a happier place than Belarus.

  If something as fundamental as community structure can change with a change of prime predator, I’d have thought that dreams would change too. The dream life of a badger must reflect the emotional colour of the wood, and a wood with wolves is all red and black.

  Professional biologists don’t like talking about animal emotion. Mention the word, and there’s a collective indrawing of breath over those mellifluous academic tongues, a Mexican wave of raised eyebrows and an exchange of pitying glances as they acknowledge that the benighted speaker isn’t one of the club. It’s fine to talk about animal cognition, because that sort of talk is comfortably grounded in the sole and tyrannous metaphor used by mainstream behaviourists – and by which they are used: the computer. Chat about an animal as a piece of hardware running (or even being) a bit of software, and you’ll meet only smiles. It’s fine to talk about indices of welfare: about the rising of corticosteroid levels in unhappy (sorry, stressed) cows. But emotion: no.

  There was one biologist who didn’t share this distaste. He was a fine naturalist; a sympathetic and unsentimental observer who wasn’t marinated in Darwinist reductionism at university. His name was Charles Darwin, and he wrote a splendid and almost unread book called The Expression of Emotions in Animals. Here he is in a gently swashbuckling mood:

  Sir C. Bell evidently wished to draw as broad a distinction as possible between man and the lower animals; and he consequently asserts that with ‘the lower creatures there is no expression but what may be referred, more or less plainly, to their acts of volition or necessary instincts.’ He further maintains that their faces ‘seem chiefly capable of expressing rage and fear.’ But man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master. Nor can these movements in the dog be explained by acts of volition or necessary instincts, any more than the beaming eyes and smiling cheeks of a man when he meets an old friend. If Sir C. Bell had been questioned about the expression of affection in the dog, he would no doubt have answered that this animal had been created with special instincts, adapting him for association with man, and that all further enquiry on the subject was superfluous.

  That’s near the beginning of Darwin’s quite long book. He thought further enquiry about true emotion in animals far from superfluous. That’s what happens when you do your biology in the real, growling, aching, joyous world rather than being locked up in a paradigm.

  When I experience a pleasurable stimulus, my facial muscles contract in a particular way. When a dog experiences a stimulus that indicates a benefit to the dog that is comparable to the benefit of which my pleasure is an index, its facial muscles contract in a more or less identical way. Just listen to how careful I’m being to speak the language of the Academy. Isn’t it absurd? Shouldn’t we whip out Occam’s razor, and the editorial blue pencil, and talk about animal pleasure?

  And if pleasure, why not other emotions too?

  Anyone who has ever watched dogs playing or cats smooching or swifts doing thermodynamically fatuous things just for the screaming, exulting, rapturous hell of it will have read this discussion with baffled disbelief. They won’t need my cautious reasoning to conclude that when animal faces do something identical to ours in response to a stimulus that we can recognise as noxious, there’s probably something going on at an ‘emotional’ level which is comparable to that which we’d experience. It would be odd beyond belief if natural selection had conferred on us alone the emotional corollaries of the ways our worlds are.

  But this is not a mandate for anthropomorphism. To say that something is comparable is not to say that it’s the same. That is perhaps particularly the case for fear. The colour of my fear is not recognisably the same as even the colour of the fear of other humans.

 
; Although the colour of badger fear is that shrill, strident, unforgettable blue, it is not the predominant colour of their world. It may be a penumbra around the edges of their tumbling, their lust and their hunger, as the spiky grey knowledge of my own eventual annihilation is round mine.

  Do they too fear personal extinction? They certainly don’t want to die, as the mangled face of many a terrier will tell. But what is it that doesn’t want to stop? Is there an elaborate magical dialogue between the badger and its genes, along the lines of: ‘You’re our bearer: if you’re taken out, it’s all up for us. So put up a good show, won’t you, for our sakes?’ ‘Oh, all right, then: you’re the boss’? That’s the sort of conversation that much of biology tends tacitly to assume.

  I prefer a simpler and less fashionable version, which admits that a badger has a real sense of self and real pleasures which it judges as outweighing its pains. Badgers are philosophers. They have an idea of the Good Life, which presumes that there is a self that can lead that life. This is a self that doesn’t want to lose the neurological joys of nuzzling cubs or the smell of wild garlic or the smack of earthworms against the tongue. Insist if you like that all these things are the payment given by the genes for the mercenary services in their defence of the strong-jawed pheno-type. That’s fine. Your insistence doesn’t dispose of the self, or the Goodness of the Life that self leads.