Being a Beast (14 page)

A fox can hear a squeaking vole 100 metres (109 yards) away and rooks winging across plough half a kilometre (a third of a mile) off. To lie ten metres (eleven yards) from a speeding van must be apocalyptic: like living inside a tornado. Even the sneezing, snoring, grumbling, humming, moaning, turning, deep night of the inner city is a cacophonous fairground.

It's the fox's plasticity that so daunts me. I can get an intellectual, or at least a poetical, grip on acute sensitivity in another animal. But acute sensitivity
and
intense toleration: that's hard. And it's not as if it is mere reluctant toleration for the sake of survival, as with the badgers who, because suitable habitats are hard to find, might put up with a rather suboptimal railway embankment. Foxes seem to
enjoy
being outrageous. They flaunt their thriving in conditions that are objectively wretched. They don't want my loud, tree-hugging sermons on their behalf, and I feel not only miffed but mystified. They are the true citizens of the world. I'm not, and I rather resent them for bettering me. I also don't understand how they do it, either physiologically or emotionally.

You'd expect a truly cosmopolitan creature to make some costly compromises: to give up some hearing in return for better eyes, or some smell for some sight. Surely generalists can't be great specialists? But they are. I'm in awe.

✴ ✴

I hated the East End. ‘This place is an offence', I wrote bitterly in a notebook.

It was built on water meadows as a refugee camp and is now a workhouse from which, because of poverty or wealth, few can afford to escape. Few would say these days that it's home, and even fewer would say so gladly. Few people really live
here
at all. They beam their thoughts in from outer space, fly their food in from Thailand and their fripperies from China, and their furniture sails in a steel box from Sweden. I suppose that's not really so far. We are, after all, made of star dust.

Though foxes are made of star dust too, and eat Thai chicken curry, they're genuinely local. They know the taste of every square inch of concrete; they've looked from a range of about three inches at every spreading stain of lichen up to eighteen inches from the ground; they know that there's a mouse nest under the porch at number 17A and bumblebees by the cedar wood decking at number 29B. They've watched the tedious adulteries of Mrs S, Mr K being carted off to die, and the psychosis of the M twins blossoming from petty backyard cruelties into much worse. They know the flight paths of jumbo jets and greylag geese. Under the shed they nestle among the oysters that gave the local Victorians typhoid. They walk around the area for nearly five miles a night, and they do it with everything switched on.

But they're not around for long. Being an urban fox is an intense, dangerous business. Sixty per cent of London's foxes die each year. Eighty-eight per cent of Oxford foxes die before their second birthday. They know bereavement. There's only a 16 per cent chance that both animals of a fox pair that have raised cubs in their first reproductive year will survive for a second breeding season. They don't just know the fact of bereavement; they feel it – apparently as I do, and they make similar sounds.

David Macdonald, who has conducted, from his base in Oxford, much of the most significant work on fox behaviour, kept pet foxes. (He commented that his landlady found his flat curiously hard to rent when he left it. Not everyone shares my, or his, taste for the smell of fox urine.) One of his vixens was caught in the flailing blades of a grass cutter. A leg dangled by a thread of tissue. Macdonald's distraught wife picked her up. The vixen's mate tried to pull the vixen away as she was carried to the car, and looked after the car as it drove down the path.

The next day the vixen's sister picked up a mouthful of food at a cache and ran off with it, whimpering as foxes do when they're giving food to cubs. She hadn't called like that for over a year. She took the food to the grass hollow where, the night before, her sister had bled. She buried it beneath the bloodstained blades of grass.

This has the pathos of my own story, and it was this that made me more anthropomorphic about foxes than about any of my other animals. I felt more confident about reading them right than about the others.

✴ ✴

Foxes and dogs are very, very different. They're in different genera. They parted company about 12 million years ago – a divergence reflected in the number of chromosomes: domestic dogs (evolved wolves) have seventy-eight pairs; red foxes thirty-four to thirty-eight pairs. You needn't put your poodle on the pill if there's a libidinous dog fox oiling around. And yet there's
something
to be learned about foxes from looking at dogs.

Dogs are specialists in getting along with humans: they have been selected rigorously for it over the past 50,000 years or so. Foxes are not: evolution has nudged them in other, less placid, directions. But it's not unreasonable to suggest that foxes have at least the raw mental processing power of dogs. If that's right, by seeing what dogs can do we can get some idea about the resources available to foxes.

Dogs are supreme copiers and bonders. They mimic human actions as well as a sixteen-month-old child, observe closely what humans are looking at or pointing to, read many human social cues and want to work with us.

Some dogs have capacious memories. One should be careful about drawing conclusions about normality from the spectacular tricks of savants, but the ends of a bell curve do indicate something about where the middle lies. So let's consider a Border collie called Rico who appeared on German TV in 2001. He knew the names of two hundred toys, fetched them by name, and learned and remembered words as fast as a human toddler. When a new toy was placed among his old ones, he recognised it by a process which must have been something like: ‘I know the others, but I've never seen this: so this must be the new one.' When he'd not seen the new toy for a month, he picked it out correctly in half his trials. The new name had become part of his lexicon: he seemed to slot new words into some Chomskyite template. Another dog, Betsy, tested in a Hungarian laboratory, had a vocabulary of more than three hundred words.

These capacities and tendencies have obvious emotional (there, I've used the word) corollaries.

Dogs suffer separation anxiety when parted from an owner to whom they are bonded. When the owner returns, they race out to greet them, jumping up and dancing; for all the world like a toddler reunited with its mother. Up on the Howden Moors in the Derbyshire Peak District, where I used to roam as a child, a sheepdog called Tip stayed with the body of his dead master for a desolate, dangerous fifteen weeks.

I can't believe that foxes have used their available RAM in so radically different a way from dogs that these traits have no echoes at all in fox heads. We know that foxes have good memories: they recall, for weeks at a time, not only the location of cached food but also the particular food that is cached there – ‘There's a bank vole to the left of the twisted oak; a field vole under the nettles,' they say to themselves. We know that they have a significant vocabulary of their own, produced using a sophisticated suite of methods (at least twenty-eight groups of sounds, based on forty basic forms of sound production), and that the call of individual X is recognised as that of individual X rather than that of a generic fox: a monogamous captive male reacted to recordings only of his own mate.

These faculties in the fox translate just as inevitably into relationality as the corresponding faculties do in dogs. It's just that the relation, as of course will be the norm with animals (the dog-man case is a highly unusual one), is with other foxes. Who, having heard Macdonald's story of the mutilated vixen, could doubt it?

Here's another of his. A tame dog fox got a thorn in his paw. Septicaemia set in. The dominant vixen of his group gave him food when he was ill. That's very unusual: adult foxes are usually aggressively possessive about food.

No doubt this is reciprocal altruism. The vixen, at some level, expected a kickback in the event of her being ill. But that label doesn't begin to mean that there isn't a real emotional component. No doubt my love for my children and the sacrifices I make for them have at least a partial Darwinian explanation: I want them to bear my genes triumphantly on into posterity. But that doesn't mean that I wouldn't be genuinely distressed by their non-reproductive-potential-affecting injury, or that my devastation at their deaths wouldn't go far, far beyond the distress caused by the mere trashing of my genetic aspirations.

I prefer the easy, obvious reading of Macdonald's stories and of the lessons from the dogs. Foxes are relational, empathic creatures. And you can shout ‘Beatrix Potter' as loudly as you like: I don't care.

This relationality and empathy of fox X is, so far as we know, directed primarily towards other foxes with whom X shares an interest. That's what Neo-Darwin says, and no doubt he's right. But once you've got a capacity for relationality and empathy, it's terribly difficult to keep it tidily in its box. It keeps spilling out over other evolutionarily irrelevant individuals and species. People give money to donkeys and to starving children from whom they'll never get any benefit. They even give it secretly, denying themselves the chance of being applauded and favoured as a mensch. A Nazi with children of his own will find it harder to bayonet the children of others than one in whom relationality has never kindled.

This is what I told myself, on my knees next to the crane flies and the foxes. Those foxes have the ability to connect to me, and I to them. And there's no reason why they shouldn't want to. There have been times (whole seconds at a time) when I've looked at foxes and they've looked at me (in a Yorkshire wood; on a Cornish cliff; in an orange grove near Haifa; on a beach in the Peloponnese), and I've thought: Yes! There's a rudimentary language in which we can describe ourselves to the other, and the other to ourselves. We needn't be as mutually inaccessible as Earth and the Baby Boom Galaxy.

Even when those long seconds have passed, I've still been able to say to the fox: Listen – we've both got bodies, and they get wet as the clouds burst on their way up from the grey sea, and we're both
here! I
am here!
You
are here!

I and thou!

Then it's usually time to go to the pub.

✴ ✴

When I lived in the East End I'd often give the arrabbiata a miss and shuffle instead at night round the bins, rifling through the bags. A fox's nose has no problem telling, through a thick layer of black plastic, whether there's anything worth its while, but even thin plastic defeated mine. I had to open the bags up.

It was only the instinctive phobia of the saliva of my own species that made eating scraps unpleasant. I cheated. I sprinkled mixed spices on everything. That, absurdly, seemed to sterilise it, or at least personalise it and defuse the threat of the dribbling other.

At first I tried caching like foxes do. I gave it up in disgust when I returned to a cache of rice in a foil box and found three brown rats with their snouts in it like piglets round a trough. A proper fox would have had them for starters.

The takings were good but dull. If the East End is like the rest of the Western world, it throws away about a third of all the food it buys. There was no shortage of pizza, chicken tikka masala, egg-fried rice, toast, chips and sausages. But not much else. In this most variegated of all English societies, everyone eats the same as everyone else, and the same all the time. Foxes, even here, do much better than the humans. They have pizza, chicken tikka masala, egg-fried rice, toast, chips, sausages, field voles, bank voles, house mice, road casualties of all kinds, wild fruit in season and the air-freighted unwild, unseasonal fruit of South America and Africa, cockchafer grubs, noctuid moth caterpillars, beetles, rat-tailed maggots from the sewage outlets, earthworms, rabbits (wild and insecurely caged ones), slow, complacent birds, rubber bands, broken glass, KFC wrappers, grass to snare intestinal parasitic worms and induce therapeutic vomiting, and just about everything else. But, unfortunately, they're not significant cat killers.

As I mooched round the bins I listened and I watched. I found in the houses and the flats what I found in the bags: uniformity. Everyone had a more or less identical cultural diet. One drizzling September night I stood on the pavement, eating an abandoned pie and looking through windows. I could tell from the flickering that seventy-three households were watching TV. Of those, sixty-four (sixty-four!), the coordinated flickering told me, were watching the same thing.

No fox ever looks at the same thing as another fox. Even when a family is curled up together, each fox either has its eyes shut, dreaming about chicken houses or a vole glut or an onion bhaji, or is looking out from a slightly different angle from every other fox, its understanding of what it's seeing modulated by the slightly different precedence each gives to smell and hearing, with those in turn being conditioned by cement dust in the nose from snuffling round a building site, the angle of the ears, or parental instructions from cubhood.

We too have blocked noses and positions in space, but we're such unsensory, unmindful creatures that they make no difference to us: we don't notice them. We have acutely sensitive hands but handle the world with thick gloves and then, bored, blame it for lacking shape.

✴ ✴

I'd just about given up on London, but the foxes' faith in it and the intensity of their commitment to it touched me and made me think again. I suspected that if I could get as close to it as they were I'd see it properly, and therefore learn to love it. To hate anything is exhausting. I hoped that the foxes could help me to rest.

When I lived here I was almost anaesthetic. Like the accursed in the psalm, I had eyes but could not see, a nose but could not smell, hands but could not feel, and ears but could not hear. I was constantly being told that this was where it was all happening; where the real business of life was done. Sometimes I could dimly sense that something
was
happening, but it seemed distant, blurred and muffled, as if I were looking down from a great height through cloudy seawater.