Oh this is, this has to be, one of the strangest, funniest, and, in some places, most revolting books I've ever read. It's called Being a Beast and is by a vet and barrister, Charles Foster, who, as it happens, teaches at Oxford. Anyone who doubts that the English - particularly those from blue-blooded stock - can stake a claim to the title of the most eccentric people on earth has to read this.
Foster wanted to experience life as a wild animal. He did a lot of research into the physiology of his chosen creatures, as well as their habits and habitats. Then he tried to live their life.
It involves stinking days and nights in setts and under sheds, disgusting food (earthworms, waste and, a pleasant change, nettles) and crawling about on all fours.
He has huge admiration for foxes, feels fondness for badgers, rather dislikes otters and believes that ungulates deserve to be eaten. It's not like he's much akin to tree-hugging me. But he did get closer to all of these creatures than seems imaginable.
The real lesson from his exploration of otherness, though, is that these animals really live. Their existence has such sharp, visceral intensity. Their senses haven't atrophied like ours, for all the adjustments they have had to make to living in a world overpopulated with coarse-minded, anaesthetised bipeds.
Some of the facts are incredible - that badgers die and decay in their setts, so their family members have to dig a passage around their corpses, which feed the worms that feed the badgers; that otters' metabolism is so turbocharged that during their waking hours they are manic and relentless, needing to kill and eat and kill and eat or die; that starving deer in the frozen Highlands smell like pear-drops as they ingest their muscles; that foxes, with their incredibly acute hearing, can sleep on the central reservations of motorways.
Foster is a sane madman. A mad lunatic. And a strange inspiration.
Kommentare