In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published a now-famous essay titled “What is it like
to be a bat?”, in which he argued that we can never truly know. We can just about conceive what it might be like to have webbed arms and poor vision, to navigate using sonar, to eat insects and to spend our days hanging upside down in an attic, but that is not the same as experiencing the world like a bat. “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” he wrote. “Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and
those resources are inadequate to the task.”
It may be impossible for us to enter another animal’s perceptual reality, or for it to enter ours. The worlds of other animals and the ways in which they experience them are very different to our own. But who’s to say we can’t cross over sometimes, or connect in small meaningful ways. Many of us long to reach out across the divide, into the dance of other lives, or to join even momentarily the community of wild things.
The experience can be deeply enriching. People who spend time close to wild animals are
often profoundly affected.
English and Irish medieval ascetics regularly shared their remote monastic outposts with birds and animals, believing that their animalistic existence brought them closer to the divine. Vladimir Nabokov, who was a passionate lepidopterist as well as an acclaimed novelist, thought of nature, like art, as a form of magic. “The highest enjoyment of timelessness,” he wrote, “is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which I cannot explain.”
The British nature writer John Lewis-Stempel regards his relationship with an injured crow that he rescued from the roadside and nursed back to health as “one of the greatest privileges in my life”. Craig Foster, who spent nearly a year following and interacting with an octopus off the Cape Peninsula in South Africa (as seen in the film My Octopus Teacher), said his time with the animal taught him “to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor”, a realization that also changed the way he felt about people, reminding him what it was like to be close to another being.
Nearer to home, a friend of mine who lost his wife to cancer found solace in the visitations of a robin that came to his house for food and, it seemed, for company. The robin would fly into his kitchen and feed from his hand, and sometimes accompanied him to his wife’s grave in the churchyard up the road. This bird was the offspring of a robin that used to visit the house when his wife was alive, and my friend felt that the younger redbreast was continuing a ritual it had learned from its parent, or more poignantly, that it was simply checking up on
him.
Whatever the reason, its attentions provided him with a mooring in the bewilderment of his loss. He was not the first to discover that reaching out beyond ourselves can provide an alternative perspective and soften wounds without us understanding why. Many of us try to lose our sorrow by running into the wild; sometimes the wild comes to us.
Wild animals have been known to incorporate themselves into human worlds with
surprising ease. In 1957, the writer Gavin Maxwell returned home to the Scottish Highlands from the southern marshes of Iraq with an otter cub named Mijbil. Mijbil remained with Maxwell until the otter’s death a year later, living in (and frequently laying waste to) his house, sleeping in his bed, sharing his bath, chasing eels in the stream and walking the streets on a lead on occasional trips to London.
In his book Ring of Bright Water, Maxwell describes his relationship with Mijbil as trusting
and intensely emotional. “I became, during a year of his constant and violently affectionate
companionship, fonder of him than of almost any human being, and to write of him in the past tense makes me feel as desolate as one who has lost an only child.”
For some, getting close to a wild animal is not enough. They want to be the animal. The desire to enter the skin of another species is perhaps as old as humanity itself. For those who try it, it rarely works out the way they imagined.
In her book H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald describes how owning and living with a goshawk, a bird that had fascinated her since childhood, took her “to the very edge of being a human” and then “to somewhere I wasn’t human at all”. It gave her the perspective she craved – “that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk’s eye” – but the experience turned out to be so alien, so contrary to the human regard, that it nearly drove her mad.
The idea of stepping into another creature’s sensory world can seem far-fetched. Yet wherever we look in our nature-deprived age, thoughts of animals are never far from the surface. While writing my book Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind, I asked around thirty friends if they had ever fantasized about changing species. Around half of them admitted they had.
They included five wannabe golden eagles (for their strength and freedom), several cats (for their independence), a lion (for its jungle kingliness), a couple of horses (for their wildness and speed), a fox (for its nocturnal smarts), a mallard (for its showy elegance), a goat (for its ability to live anywhere), a koala (for its climbing skills) and a golden jackal (for its omnivorous tastes).
Thinking about animals in this way can be a valuable exercise. It not only forces us to imagine what it might be like to be one, but it also – for a few moments at least – obliges us to contemplate our own creatureliness, and to consider the many attributes that we share with them. It’s all too easy to forget that we’re no less animal than the next creature.
Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind, published by Picador on 19 March 2026.
