Free Being a Beast by Charles Foster

Schubert in the conservatoire to a candle-lit bordello where you wade through beer to the bed. If I had to pick one word for the badger’s experience, it would be intimate . Grass and bracken stems brush your face. When you’re forcing a new path, every step is like a birth. Water shudders off grass into your eyes. Things slide away. Slide; hop; rush. You don’t just absorb the world; you make it. You make the fear that rustles away on every side.
    When a badger goes out, its object is to bump into food. This system of incontinent collision with the wood makes it more a creature of the wood than any other inhabitant. We bustled and grunted and elbowed and pushed and pressed our noses into the ground. And even we smelt something: the citrusy piss of the voles in their runs within the grass; the distantly marine tang of a slug trail, like a winter rock pool; the crushed laurel of a frog; the dustiness of a toad; the sharp musk of a weasel; the blunter musk of an otter; and the fox, whose smell is red to the least synaesthetic man alive. But most of all we had what we clumsily called the earth: leaves and dung and corpses and houses and rain and eggs and horrors.
    We got these things usually as single words; occasionally as short sentences. If we had noses like badgers’ they would have been intricate stories, weaving in and out of each other, punctuated by possibility and frustration.
    When Tom and I snuffled through the wood on our first few nights, I began to feel trapped by my visualness. As I got occasional nose glimpses of the wood and became able to guess at some of what I was missing, this became the full-blown panic, regret and bereavement of the prisoner. I made ludicrous, mystical plans for escape. They failed. The sensory claustrophobia has never abated. When, now, I pray for redemption, a redeemed nose is high up on the list of petitions.
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    Making something of the badger’s auditory world wasn’t quite so hopeless. Badgers have much better sensitivity to high frequencies than we do. They probably hear sounds up to around 60,000 hertz, whereas even the most acute human children won’t go much beyond around 25,000 hertz, and many humans of sixty-plus will stop at about 8,000 hertz. Badgers will pick up many of the squeaks of a bank vole, inaudible to us. But a squeak isn’t unimaginable. I live in a house full of them. And squeaks aren’t all that badgers hear. We share most, but not all, of the badger’s bandwidth. The badger notes the pheasants exploding from the edge of the field, the thump of the generator up at the house, the mewing of the wood warblers, the panic of a sheep caught in the wire and the grumble of distant thunder. At least, their ears register these things, and there is electrical activity in the auditory parts of their brain cortices shortly afterwards. What does the individual badger ‘hear’ as a result of the changing pressures on its tympanum that we choose to call a sound? Strictly speaking, I have no idea. I have no idea what Mozart sounds like to anyone apart from me (and even that sound changes massively with my state of digestion). This isn’t a problem of physiology; it’s the problem of otherness, which we inadequately physiologise as a difficulty in enquiring into the nature of complex central processing. We can’t know that we’re not alone. It is an act of pure faith for me to declare that there are some things I share with my children and my best friends. And I choose similarly to believe that a badger hears those pheasants instead of merely noting them. In the case of my children and friends, my choice is supported to some degree by EEGs and auditory stem potentials and functional MRI scans (although there are no such data, so far as I know, for badgers). But the support is very limited, and I can’t blame anyone for not joining me in my act of faith.
    We’re probably safe in saying, though, that