Beastie Boys and Girls: The New Anthropomorphism

In “Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide,” the Oxford don Charles Foster records his attempts to live as animals do—specifically, as a badger, an otter, a fox, a red deer, and a swift. The book, published in Britain last week, has caught on. The Financial Times calls it both “brilliant” and “bonkers”—“a strange kind of masterpiece: the song of a satyr, perhaps, or nature writing as extreme sport.” To be a badger, Foster took along his eight-year-old son, Tom, to better duplicate the creatures’ highly social lifestyle. The pair slept in a dirt hole and crawled on the forest floor and ate raw earthworms.