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A review by andrewspink
Being A Beast by Charles Foster
adventurous
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
Charles Foster is clearly a complete nutter, which made for an interesting book. In order to determine what it is like to be various animals, he lives in a hole in the ground and eats earthworms for some months to see what it is like to be a badger and or vomiting his food up so that he would know what it was like to be an animal that chews the cud, like a deer.
Quite early on, he concludes that he cannot really feel what it is like to have the auditory world of a badger, 'not because of physiology but of otherness'. Despite that, he goes on to project a whole lot of his own emotions and feelings into what it must be like to be a badger or deer. It is only really in the final chapter, about swifts, where he concludes that swifts are so other that he cannot get inside their heads. My problem with this book is not that he says that animals have emotions. He says that professional biologists disapproved of that statement. That might have been the case a few decades ago, but by the time this book was published in 2016, very few behavioural biologists would oppose the term. My problem is that he does not sufficiently allow the animals to have their own emotions and tries to make everything fit into his own range of experience, an endeavour necessarily fated to fail. He describes how he goes through various contortions trying to understand what the sensory world of an animal that has whiskers might be like, but in the end seeing we don't have that sense, it is literally beyond our imagination. It is really not like feeling with our hands, that we do know (and I should mention that I am a co-author on a paper recently published about whiskers!).
He states at one point that otters don't experience pain. That is a very bizarre and ungrounded statement. All animals (possibly excluding insects), but certainly mammals, reptiles, fish and birds, feel pain.
He says that foxes can leap 3m, which is equivalent to him jumping 8m. This is an unfortunately common mistake made by nature programmes on the TV and by popular sciences books. This comparison misapplies scaling laws. The ability to jump does not scale linearly with size because the physics of jumping involves factors like muscle strength, body mass, and energy expenditure, which do not scale in a simple linear fashion.
He also doesn't understand red-green colour blindness. Like 8% of human males, I am red-green colour-blind. That does not mean that I see everything in grey scale, far from it. It means something like that sometimes red is rather like a shade of green.
Finally, he gives space to the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake. His ideas were discredited decades ago, I don't think anyone who has actually looked into the so-called evidence for them takes them seriously these days.
Nevertheless, having said all that, those are minor quibbles and this was a though-provoking book which I enjoyed reading.
Quite early on, he concludes that he cannot really feel what it is like to have the auditory world of a badger, 'not because of physiology but of otherness'. Despite that, he goes on to project a whole lot of his own emotions and feelings into what it must be like to be a badger or deer. It is only really in the final chapter, about swifts, where he concludes that swifts are so other that he cannot get inside their heads. My problem with this book is not that he says that animals have emotions. He says that professional biologists disapproved of that statement. That might have been the case a few decades ago, but by the time this book was published in 2016, very few behavioural biologists would oppose the term. My problem is that he does not sufficiently allow the animals to have their own emotions and tries to make everything fit into his own range of experience, an endeavour necessarily fated to fail. He describes how he goes through various contortions trying to understand what the sensory world of an animal that has whiskers might be like, but in the end seeing we don't have that sense, it is literally beyond our imagination. It is really not like feeling with our hands, that we do know (and I should mention that I am a co-author on a paper recently published about whiskers!).
He states at one point that otters don't experience pain. That is a very bizarre and ungrounded statement. All animals (possibly excluding insects), but certainly mammals, reptiles, fish and birds, feel pain.
He says that foxes can leap 3m, which is equivalent to him jumping 8m. This is an unfortunately common mistake made by nature programmes on the TV and by popular sciences books. This comparison misapplies scaling laws. The ability to jump does not scale linearly with size because the physics of jumping involves factors like muscle strength, body mass, and energy expenditure, which do not scale in a simple linear fashion.
He also doesn't understand red-green colour blindness. Like 8% of human males, I am red-green colour-blind. That does not mean that I see everything in grey scale, far from it. It means something like that sometimes red is rather like a shade of green.
Finally, he gives space to the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake. His ideas were discredited decades ago, I don't think anyone who has actually looked into the so-called evidence for them takes them seriously these days.
Nevertheless, having said all that, those are minor quibbles and this was a though-provoking book which I enjoyed reading.