Cry of the wild Eight animals under siege

In these imaginative and sometimes overpowering zoological fables, naturalist Foster (Being a Beast, 2016; Being a Human, 2021) shows just how besieged the natural world currently is. He presents these tales from the perspective of animals, articulating their emotions, sense of self, intelligence, and, perhaps, soul. Their journeys, struggles to survive, sensory worlds, reproduction, hunting and foraging, bolting from predators, encounters with human beings, and death are conveyed in vivid descriptions. Their environment is imbued with not only wildness but also a sense of ancientness and its own pulse. The critters include a hapless gannet, a stressed-out orca, a fox whose siblings all perish young, a male mayfly, a long-lived eel, and a peculiar girl who is ill at ease with other people. One story tenderly captures the connection between a young otter and an elderly woman hermit. Another disturbingly depicts the hardships of rabbits and a man's malevolence. Foster seethes about human "ecocidal psychopathology," including our condescendence, negligence, and wastefulness, but he glimpses hope in human creativity and our capacity for kindness. Foster emerges as a wizard of sorts, able to conjure animal spirits, bring forth enchantment (of land, sea, and sky), and make literary magic.

This wonderfully unconventional work of creative nonfiction from Foster (Being a Human), a law professor at Oxford University, draws on scientific research to provide novelistic accounts of how rabbits, otters, and other animals are facing the challenges of living in a human-dominated world. The stories impart both scientific background on their animal subjects and hauntingly intimate perspectives on their plights. For instance, Foster depicts orcas' capacity to "experience a prolonged grief" by describing a pod's deranged behavior after a collision with a container ship killed their matriarch ("Their speech and their jumps were flat, they sometimes groomed one another manically and sometimes forgot to groom at all"). The author personifies his subjects without lapsing into saccharine anthropomorphizing, as when he provides a Gladiator-worthy account of a fox's battles against other males for the approval of a female in heat ("Before she submitted, teeth had to be sharp, reflexes brisk, endurance endless, desire ablaze"). Elsewhere, Foster discusses eels' struggle to reproduce amid rising infertility caused by pesticides and a pair of gannet birds' futile efforts to incubate eggs, whose fatally thin shells likely resulted from the parents' ingestion of pollutants. Foster is the kind of effortlessly adept writer likely to drive other authors to envy, and his bold gamble to break the scientific taboo around imagining animals' interior lives pays off magnificently. Readers will be awed. (May)