Being a fox

I spotted the fox scouting along the hedge as  I walked past a field gate and I stopped for a while to watch it. Low to the ground among the dry grass stalks it moved unevenly, pausing to sniff or peer, flinching at a distant sound, backtracking to check a scent and finally scurrying off at a rapid pace as if it had forgotten something it had left in the oven.

Back home the post had brought the book Being A Beast by Charles Foster, an Oxford academic whose publication has attracted a deal of recent media interest. His attempts to understand the lives of wild animals (badgers, foxes, swifts, otters, deer) by living as they do, for short periods of time, have involved not just empathy and imagination but the replication of the physical experience itself.
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 [London], 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.
Not hard either to imagine the reaction of the police officer who finds him curled under the bushes. Foster attempts to explain he's trying to be a fox, seeing what it's like to listen all day to the traffic and watch the the ankles and calves of people passing by.
The last observation was a bad, bad mistake. I knew it as soon as it was out. For him, calves, ankles and concealment in an evergreen shrub meant perversion so deep it should be measured in years inside. Fortunately for Foster the policeman concludes he's eccentric rather than criminal and tells him to bugger off home.
The chapter on badgers describes in rich detail what it's like to eat raw earthworms.
Eccentric though the concept may be, the book is a tender and passionate endeavour to get under the skin of the animals whose lives intersect with ours. It's not possible of course but the attempt is entertaining and deserves respect. It takes humanity to explore beastliness.