Being a Beast (4 page)

It was hard work, but eventually we were done. We crawled down to the river, lapped from a pool where leeches waved at our lips, and crawled back to our chamber, where we fell asleep, side by side and head to toe, as all good badgers do. It makes the best use of the space. Tom always moved in the night. ‘Feet in the face aren't friendly', he said.

I dreamt: the florid, in-your-face dreams that lie just beneath consciousness. The sort of dreams you get in the tropics, when things in green and gold dance to the beat of the ceiling fan. Here, though, the beat was Tom's heart against my head, and the tune was the low hum of the hill and the girl's voice of the river.

I don't doubt for a moment that badgers have some sort of consciousness. One of the reasons is that I've seen them sleeping. There's plainly something going on in their heads when they're asleep. They paddle, yip and snarl; the full repertoire of expressions plays out on their faces. There is some sort of story being enacted. And what can the central character be but the badger's
self
? The misty land of sleep is where our own selves, so often suppressed, denied and violated, walk proud and have an uninterrupted voice.

It's no doubt true that the dreaming badger is processing data from the day or night just gone; is trying out, for evolutionarily obvious reasons, the way in which it might, in the light of the new data, respond to future challenges. But this dry formulation doesn't elbow out the self: far from it. The self is the substrate of the concerns that are being addressed.

I've often thought that sleep must be doing something like a defragmentation program on a computer. Files are being shifted from where the day has dumped them to the cabinets from which they can be more easily extracted. When I self-hypnotise, my eyelids flicker in hypnotism's emulation of rapid eye movement sleep, and the flickering is just like the flickering of the little red light when the defrag program is running. Indeed, I can feel the defrag. But the analogy is not complete. A defrag program doesn't need a story. Sleeping badgers have stories, and stories need subjects.

What might it mean for an unconscious creature to dream? Indeed to sleep at all? What's being lost when ‘consciousness' is lost? What accompanies the creature into the world beyond the veil? If badgers aren't conscious in a sense comparable to us, their sleeping smiles and winces are more inscrutable than consciousness itself. I prefer the lesser mystery.

✴ ✴

We awoke in stages (or became more evenly awake, since the wild won't usually abandon you utterly to unconsciousness: there's too much happening), to the rattling of a jay and, more fully, to the growling of an engine. It was Burt, with fish pie.

‘Bogus, I know, but I won't tell anyone.'

In fact, it wasn't bogus at all. Badgers are the ultimate opportunistic omnivores. No badger would turn up its nose at fish pie.

‘I'll tell you what, though', he went on. ‘To compensate, I'll come down later and set the dogs on you. And then we'll go up to the road and I'll try to run you over.'

Yes, very amusing. Yet the point was serious. I'd tended to think that a badger's life was painted in the colours of the wood. These colours I could hope to see too. But there was a darker colour there – the colour of fear. You see that colour – a pale electric blue in my mind's eye – on the edges of bristling fur when a badger stops on its path through the fern, having got a nose full of human stench, and around the tips of straining ears as it hears a dog that's slightly nearer than the usual farm dog.

By killing all the wolves, we have appointed ourselves as the badger's prime tormentor. If badgers do dream, we appear in their worst nightmares – unless they revert in sleep to the distant times when wolves hunted badgers down to a final snarling stand against the bole of an oak. Memories live a long time in wild heads. Red deer panic wildly if you let them sniff lion dung, although it's been millennia since lions were a worry.

In fact, I doubt that badgers dream of wolves. Badgers have altered their lives significantly to take account of their wolf-lessness, and I'd expect their psyches to follow their behaviour. Where there are wolves (in the more howling parts of eastern Europe, for instance), badgers aren't the bustlingly communal animals they are here. There aren't the big ancestral palaces in well-drained hillsides. Instead, badgers live in smaller, more intimate, less playful units. If there are wolves out there, badgers tend to take nervous, prudent, straight-line journeys, which reduces the amount of foraging and so reduces the number of badgers an area can hold. True, big setts are convenient for psychopaths with pit bulls, but psychopaths are less efficient predators than wolves, and they don't like to stray too far from roads. Wales can be vile to badgers, but it's a happier place than Belarus.

If something as fundamental as community structure can change with a change of prime predator, I'd have thought that dreams would change too. The dream life of a badger must reflect the emotional colour of the wood, and a wood with wolves is all red and black.

Professional biologists don't like talking about animal
emotion
. Mention the word, and there's a collective indrawing of breath over those mellifluous academic tongues, a Mexican wave of raised eyebrows and an exchange of pitying glances as they acknowledge that the benighted speaker isn't one of the club. It's fine to talk about animal cognition, because that sort of talk is comfortably grounded in the sole and tyrannous metaphor used by mainstream behaviourists – and
by
which they are used: the computer. Chat about an animal as a piece of hardware running (or even being) a bit of software, and you'll meet only smiles. It's fine to talk about indices of welfare: about the rising of corticosteroid levels in unhappy (sorry, stressed) cows. But emotion: no.

There was one biologist who didn't share this distaste. He was a fine naturalist; a sympathetic and unsentimental observer who wasn't marinated in Darwinist reductionism at university. His name was Charles Darwin, and he wrote a splendid and almost unread book called
The Expression of Emotions in Animals
. Here he is in a gently swashbuckling mood:

Sir C. Bell evidently wished to draw as broad a distinction as possible between man and the lower animals; and he consequently asserts that with ‘the lower creatures there is no expression but what may be referred, more or less plainly, to their acts of volition or necessary instincts.' He further maintains that their faces ‘seem chiefly capable of expressing rage and fear.' But man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master. Nor can these movements in the dog be explained by acts of volition or necessary instincts, any more than the beaming eyes and smiling cheeks of a man when he meets an old friend. If Sir C. Bell had been questioned about the expression of affection in the dog, he would no doubt have answered that this animal had been created with special instincts, adapting him for association with man, and that all further enquiry on the subject was superfluous.

That's near the beginning of Darwin's quite long book. He thought further enquiry about true emotion in animals far from superfluous. That's what happens when you do your biology in the real, growling, aching, joyous world rather than being locked up in a paradigm.

When I experience a pleasurable stimulus, my facial muscles contract in a particular way. When a dog experiences a stimulus that indicates a benefit to the dog that is comparable to the benefit of which my pleasure is an index, its facial muscles contract in a more or less identical way. Just listen to how careful I'm being to speak the language of the Academy. Isn't it absurd? Shouldn't we whip out Occam's razor, and the editorial blue pencil, and talk about animal pleasure?

And if pleasure, why not other emotions too?

Anyone who has ever watched dogs playing or cats smooching or swifts doing thermodynamically fatuous things just for the screaming, exulting, rapturous hell of it will have read this discussion with baffled disbelief. They won't need my cautious reasoning to conclude that when animal faces do something identical to ours in response to a stimulus that we can recognise as noxious, there's probably something going on at an ‘emotional' level which is comparable to that which we'd experience. It would be odd beyond belief if natural selection had conferred on us alone the emotional corollaries of the ways our worlds are.

But this is not a mandate for anthropomorphism. To say that something is comparable is not to say that it's the same. That is perhaps particularly the case for fear. The colour of my fear is not recognisably the same as even the colour of the fear of other humans.

Although the colour of badger fear is that shrill, strident, unforgettable blue, it is not the predominant colour of their world. It may be a penumbra around the edges of their tumbling, their lust and their hunger, as the spiky grey knowledge of my own eventual annihilation is round mine.

Do they too fear personal extinction? They certainly don't want to die, as the mangled face of many a terrier will tell. But what is it that doesn't want to stop? Is there an elaborate magical dialogue between the badger and its genes, along the lines of: ‘You're our bearer: if you're taken out, it's all up for us. So put up a good show, won't you, for our sakes?' ‘Oh, all right, then: you're the boss'? That's the sort of conversation that much of biology tends tacitly to assume.

I prefer a simpler and less fashionable version, which admits that a badger has a real sense of self and real pleasures which it judges as outweighing its pains. Badgers are philosophers. They have an idea of the Good Life, which presumes that there is a self that can lead that life. This is a self that doesn't want to lose the neurological joys of nuzzling cubs or the smell of wild garlic or the smack of earthworms against the tongue. Insist if you like that all these things are the payment given by the genes for the mercenary services in their defence of the strong-jawed pheno-type. That's fine. Your insistence doesn't dispose of the self, or the Goodness of the Life that self leads.

✴ ✴

We put the fish pie in a plastic box and put it in the river to keep cool. The box wasn't terribly badgerish, but then again, badgers, although they're enthusiastic scavengers, seem to prefer their carrion fresh – even though carcases that are further gone have the added garnish of maggots, which you'd have thought badgers would think of as children think of chocolate drops sprinkled on pudding. I doubt it's the risk of infection that inhibits them. Badgers lose their immunological naivety very quickly and don't spend their lives throwing up into the ferns. All thoughtful human parents should mix pureed earthworms with the milk: it'd abolish asthma and eczema and exorcise later fears of a bad curry. But badgers, like many animals and some people, can vomit, where necessary, without much distress: they hardly break stride. I'd like to be like that.

Having stowed the pie, we stumbled up the bank and hollowed out a nest in the bracken. The stems soared above us like the fluted columns of a devastated cathedral. Green light slid algally over Tom's face and neck, decomposing him. Less poetically, a sheep tick scuttled under his shirt. Ticks are always in a hurry. I pulled up the shirt and watched, interested to see what site it would choose. They tend to go for my groin or my armpit, which seems logical, but our children tend to get them somewhere obvious on their torsos, which doesn't seem to be. Though perhaps the poorer innervation there means that they're less likely to be detected, and there's no abrasion from a moving joint or a swinging scrotum. Sure enough, this one, though it could have had the discreet dampness of an armpit, began to get settled over a rib. I crushed it between my nails.

Having Tom next to me made me pretty immune to ticks. They go for him every time. It's presumably a scent thing: they head for him rather than me long before they can know that his skin is thinner and that they won't have to fight through a noxious jungle of oily hair.

Many badgers carry ticks – typically hedgehog, dog and sheep ticks – although the incidence isn't as high as one might think. The leathery skin must be a challenge, and ticks tend to concentrate around the thin skin of the anus and perineum rather than, as in dogs, on the head, the neck and the thin skin of the underbelly and the inner thighs.

Lying up outside the sett during the day isn't unbadgerish, although it's far from the rule. Badgers sometimes, just like we did, crawl into dense vegetation and lie there until dusk comes and it's time for the next round of shuffle-hunting. We don't know why that is. Perhaps there's tension at home and they can't bear the thought of a day close to wretched, cantankerous, odious X. And sometimes, no doubt, they've been caught short a long way from home as dawn breaks and don't want to run the gauntlet of the early morning dog walkers. Cubs in particular play outside during the day. It's their version of teenage rebellion, like adolescent humans staying out inconsiderately late at night. I don't imagine, though, that those days in the open are very relaxing ones. Although dangers hover round the sett, they are dangers faced in community, using old and practised strategies. Aloneness, novelty and sunlight are the badger's unholy trinity. Badgers are social to the core, and conservative, and creatures of shadow. Sunlight freezes them. It seems to switch off their senses. You can often walk right up to a daytime badger. It'll seem stunned. They are two-mode animals: on and off. They live in the no-man's-land between day and night, and that's such a demanding place that there's no room for half-heartedness.

Tom needed to sleep, and so he did, curled fetally on old bracken, his paws, earth-brown from digging, clasped under his chin. I too needed to sleep, and so I didn't. Instead, like one of those sun-stunned day badgers, I watched nothing in particular; I was a lump of idling software in a box made of meat.