CHARLES FOSTER BECOMES A BEAST
“Simply by paying attention I can do better and extract more information from the world, and that information is good. I learned that the world is a more welcoming place, and more of a home than I thought it was.”
SUBJECT Charles Foster
OCCUPATION Writer and academic
INTERVIEWER Liz Evans
PHOTOGRAPHER Elmore
LOCATION Oxford, UK
DATE February 2017
ANTIDOTE TO Existential loneliness
UNEXPECTED The advantages of dyslexia
Communing with nature has become something of a hot topic in recent years. Literally sick of technology, city life and social media, many of us seek out ways in which we can re-wild ourselves. But few have taken it as far as the British academic, Charles Foster, who decided to try on life as a variety of animals in order to forge a deeper understanding of the world.
Forget the weekend digital detox. Charles’ approach involved eating earthworms in a burrow in Wales and being hunted by a bloodhound through the woods in Somerset. None of this was romantic. Living like an animal is decidedly difficult if it’s done authentically, and it’s a slog that can never be entirely successful. If you can stick at it, it’s also profoundly transforming, as Charles explains in Being a Beast, the fabulous book he has written about his experiences.
A writer and research fellow at Oxford University, Charles is also a barrister, a traveller and a philosopher. In the past, he’s been a vet, a huntsman and a taxidermist. His curiosity about the non-human world originated in childhood, when he became fascinated with owls and blackbirds in the garden, but school scholarships and university led him away from all that into a law career and a life of privilege. Eventually, working as a barrister hollowed him out, and during a trip across the Sinai desert, Charles realised he’d lost sight of himself. Not long afterwards, his first marriage fell apart, and he began his journey back to nature. He started spending more time thinking about animals again.
Now re-married with six children (two of them are from his first), Charles divides his time between Oxford, where he’s based at Green Templeton College, and Exmoor, where he runs wild with the family. His children, he says, are his
