“You’re acting like an animal!” For most people, that statement is a terrible putdown. For two men recently profiled in The New Yorker, it would be the greatest of compliments.
The Goat Man
Thomas Thwaites was fed up with the stress and hurry of life. He longed to live in the “eternal present” of his niece’s Irish terrier, Noggin, “to smell the grass, the wind, and the water without worrying about the future, the past, the meaning of life, or the inevitability of death. How much simpler to be an animal!”
Thwaites settled on becoming a goat, and so he focused on three areas: the goat mind, the goat body, and the goat diet. To understand the mind, he learned from goat-behavior experts, and read the philosopher Martin Heidegger in order to “inhabit the mental life of a goat” by relating to his surroundings “in a goatlike way.” Rothman sums up Thwaites’ thinking:
“I need to change my context,” he resolved, “to the extent that somehow I look at a chair and don’t automatically associate it with sitting.” He would have achieved goathood when he could see a word without reading it—or, more important, “look at a(nother) goat and think of it as another person, like me.”
Trying to take on a goat-like body was more difficult. A prosthetist warned him that undertaking goat-like movements would hurt him, but Thwaites eventually “climbed atop a quartet of sawn-off crutches” and managed to mimic the gait of a goat.
The biggest challenge was goat food. Humans cannot digest grass, so Thwaites had to find cellulose for his artificial goat rumen. Once he felt he had sufficiently succeeded at adopting the goat’s mind, body, and diet, he went to Switzerland and joined a goatherd.
“On his hands and feet, he wore his goat prostheses; on his back, a goat-colored Gore-Tex jacket; on his head, a helmet designed to give him, at first glance, the face of a goat… In the end, Thwaites spent three days grazing with the goats. Later, the goat farmer to whom they belonged said he thought Thwaites had been ‘accepted by the herd.’”
The Badger Man
Thwaites’ experiment grew from his desire to escape the “egotistical anxiety” of human personhood. Charles Foster, however, wanted to become an animal for a totally different reason. He considers humanity to be “a form of self-imposed dullness and yearns for the vivid openness of animality.”
Foster’s journey began when he came across two foxes in a park, harvesting crane flies from the grass with their tongues. Foster joined the feast and found that “the flies were fuzzy, then slimy, and tasted of vanilla.”
Foster didn’t go through the hoops that Thwaites did. He just started acting the part of an animal.
“For six weeks, Foster lived as a badger in the woods. He dug an underground badger lair, or sett, sleeping there during the day and venturing out, on all fours, at night. Badgers eat earthworms. ‘When you put a worm into your mouth,’ Foster reports, ‘it senses the heat as something sinister,’ searching for gaps between your teeth until you bite down and taste ‘slime and the land.’”
Later on, after living as a badger, Foster began going out at night as a fox.
“I lay in a backyard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was, treating as hostile the humans in the row houses all around—which wasn’t hard.”
The Moral Judgment Never Discussed
Should a human try to become, or identify as, an animal?
To put that question another way: is it good, true, and beautiful for a human to attempt to live like a goat, or a dog, or a badger?
Those are the questions I kept asking as I read The New Yorker’s take on these men, because the writer, Joshua Rothman, never raised them. Throughout the essay, it is simply assumed that (1) humans should be free to live however they please and (2) “becoming an animal” is an odd, but adventurous choice on the same level as other kinds of life.
The Uniqueness of Human Life
In recent weeks, our society has debated the preciousness of animal life, and the uniqueness of humanity. When zoo officials chose to kill a gorilla in order to save a child, they stirred up considerable controversy, partly because many are confused about the value of life from species to species.
Rothman quotes a primatologist, Frans de Waal, who despises the way that humans differentiate themselves from animals:
“Even the term nonhuman grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something.”
From a biblical perspective, animals are indeed missing something – the image of God the Creator. The properties that make humanity unique and special cannot be reduced to our rationality, our artistic endeavors, or our relational capacities. All of these things are part of humankind’s uniqueness, but they miss the essence of the distinction. Only humans bear the image and likeness of the Creator.
For this reason, Christians must ask the moral question: Is it good, beautiful, and true for humans to seek to become animals?
Inescapably Human
Rothman concludes his review this way:
“Rethinking who we are; dreaming up new ways of living; taking ourselves apart to build ourselves back up—for human beings, these activities are natural. They are our never-ending hunt.”
Natural? I’m not so sure. That depends on our definition of natural. If our inclination is to satisfy our longing for peace (Thwaites) or excitement (Foster) through the lie that we can adopt adopting a beastly existence, then yes, it’s natural in the sense that our sin nature leads us to worship what is created and then become like what we worship (Romans 1:18-32).
But natural in the sense that this is something humans should pursue? No. Never. Our society’s current obsession with refiguring our identities (particularly in matters related to gender, and now species) is a symptom of a late-modern malaise, in which the Self is enthroned to the point we see our bodies as something that must conform to whatever want to make, rather than a gift we are to receive.
The irony, of course, is that only humans would dream up such a strange experiment in the first place. You won’t find badgers seeking to live under the illusion that they are frogs, or goats hoping to live as lions. An elephant cannot read Heidegger before trying to live like an ostrich.
The very attempt to become another species is something that only a human would try, which in a strange way, points back to the inescapable humanness of the whole endeavor. The image of God is a stubborn reality, shining through even the strangest ways we seek to suppress it.
