Spectator competition winners: my life as a skunk

The latest competition was inspired by the endeavours of Charles Foster, who, in his fascinating, funny book Being a Beast, recounts his attempts ‘to learn what it is like to shuffle or swoop through a landscape that is mainly olfactory and auditory rather than visual’. As a badger he took up residence in a hole and ate earthworms (they taste of ‘slime and the land’). And as an urban fox he ‘lay in a backyard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was, waiting for the night and treating as hostile the humans living in terraced houses all round — which wasn’t hard’. It’s a mighty tall order to enter the cognitive and sensory world of a different species. Foster himself acknowledges that any attempt to shuffle off his human skin entirely was doomed to failure. The best you can do, he says, is to ‘go as close as you can to the frontier and peer over it’.