In Competition No. 2948 you were invited to step into the skin of a species of your choice and provide an account of the experience.
In his fascinating, funny book Being a Beast Charles Foster attempted ‘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.
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