In recent years, the human quest to project ourselves onto the animal world has spawned subcultures—like the “furry” movement and animal tweeters—that cross an identity threshold. Photograph by Raymond McCrea Jones / Redux

In “Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide,” the Oxford don Charles Foster records his attempts to live as animals do—specifically, as a badger, an otter, a fox, a red deer, and a swift. The book, published in Britain last week, has caught on. The Financial Times calls it both “brilliant” and “bonkers”—“a strange kind of masterpiece: the song of a satyr, perhaps, or nature writing as extreme sport.” To be a badger, Foster took along his eight-year-old son, Tom, to better duplicate the creatures’ highly social lifestyle. The pair slept in a dirt hole and crawled on the forest floor and ate raw earthworms.

Foster’s obsession with “the exhilarating mysteriousness” of wild creatures began in childhood. “I somehow became convinced that they knew something I needed to know, but didn’t,” he writes. When he grew up, he became a veterinarian, a barrister, a lecturer in law at Oxford, and a father of six. But he also spent hours “diving under rocks in rivers, trying to learn more about the lifestyles of otters, or curled up in back gardens in East London, rooting in bins like an urban fox.” To prepare for life as a badger, a species with poor eyesight but exceptional powers of smell, he sniffed his children’s clothes, inhaled the odors of acquaintances while bussing their cheeks, and lay on the ground outdoors for hours. Dropped off in the Black Mountains, of Wales, he and his son burrowed a den, badger-like, for shelter. They became nocturnal, slithering to a river and lapping water using only their lips. For nourishment they foraged, scraping a dead squirrel off a road and flavoring it with wood sorrel and wild garlic.

The human quest to project ourselves onto the animal world dates to antiquity—Aesop’s Fables appeared in the sixth century B.C.—but in recent years anthropomorphism seems to have assumed a new form, spawning subcultures that cross an identity threshold. The “furry” movement, a kind of trans-animalism born in the nineties, holds conventions that draw thousands. “Furries are humans who find that their personality fits better with an animal than humans, and sometimes consider themselves spiritually aligned with these animals,” according to a schedule of the movement’s twelve conventions—in California, Texas, Virginia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, and Canada—in 2016. The largest is Anthrocon, which celebrates its twentieth con-fur-ence, in Pittsburgh, this summer. “Membership is open to any and all who like to imagine what it would be like if animals could walk and talk as we do,” its Web site explains. Attendees aren’t required to wear fursuits, but many do, along with headpieces and tails. Europe has its own version, at Eurofurence, which marks its twenty-second year this summer, in Berlin.

On the Web, a virtual wilderness of humans tweet vicariously as bears, rhinos, owls, cobras, ferrets, snow wolves, mice, pigs, pandas, sharks, squirrels, fish, and turtles—to say nothing of cats and dogs. The results reflect a mix of curiosity, empathy, humor, and, often, an ineffable longing for the primordial purity, survival skills, or simple integrity of purpose that Foster describes. As a journalist, I found that tracking down animal tweeters could be otherworldly. Two of the most popular—@BronxZoosCobra and @A_single_bear—insisted on communicating only by e-mail, in animal character. Others didn’t want their human names disclosed.

The people I happened to reach tended to be job-holding professionals, and ranged in age from twenty-seven to fifty-one. They included ministers, staff at a major Washington museum, and a health-care researcher. One has a doctorate in Russian studies.

The first major animal tweeter, in 2007, was @sockington, who is modelled on an actual gray cat with white paws rescued from a Boston subway station. A sample: “NOW WHERE DID I LEAVE MY SLEEPING SPACE can’t find it OH WAIT I FIGURED OUT it’s the entire house SILLY ME hello sleeping space FLUMP zz.” Sockington has 1.3 million followers—about the same as Bernie Sanders. Sockington’s Twitter master, Jason Scott, is an Internet archivist. Scott said that some of the tweets are from observation, “but a lot of it was building a fantasy life living inside the cat.” Scott also tweets for two other cats—@pennycat, a blind ginger, and @sockelganger, a younger cat that he and his (now) ex-wife acquired. In their tweets, the cats refer to their owners as “Fatty” and “Food Lady.” Sockington, in particular, seems to enjoy parodying human presumptions about animals.

Other trans-animals include @common_squirrel, who tweets tersely—little more than “dig dig dig dig” and “hop” and “stare” and “blink”—but has almost a hundred thousand followers. @EstherthePig has attracted more than twenty-six thousand. @A_single_bear tweets ursine philosophy to fifty-six thousand and maintains a long-form blog at helloiamabear.com.

Some accounts sprang up spontaneously from animals in the news—an injured snowy owl nesting atop the Washington Post headquarters, a black bear on the grounds of the National Institutes of Health, a cobra that broke free at the Bronx Zoo—and then survived the news cycle. The snowy owl underwent a feather transplant and rehab but was hit by a truck two years ago, after being released into the wild in Minnesota. It still tweets, however, as SpiritofDCSnowyOwl, to some fourteen hundred followers. @BronxZoosCobra hit the Internet minutes after a young female Egyptian cobra escaped in 2011. She provided venomous commentary on her supposed adventures in Manhattan. "Leaving Wall Street,” she noted. “These guys make my skin crawl." The cobra was eventually recaptured, but the account still tweets (“Eat prey, love”) to more than a hundred and fifty thousand followers. In 2013, CNN called the cobra account one of twenty-three key events reflecting Twitter power—along with the Arab Spring, the raid on Osama bin Laden, and the first tweet from space.

I happened upon a subset of animal-tweeting Episcopal priests. Scott Gunn and Sharon Pearce, ministers and spouses, tweet for their golden Labrador, @GeorgeTDog, in Cincinnati. “When we got George, a rescue, he was so full of energy,” Father Gunn told me. “It just popped into my head that if he had a Twitter persona, it would be fun to be him.” Gunn went on, “There’s so much heavy stuff happening in the world, and we need to have hearts of compassion, but we also need to laugh and play.” Gunn is part of a trio—with Episcopal priests in New York and Kentucky—who tweet for Mimi the Ferret and Nina the Horse. “It’s all clergy silliness,” he said. Anne Lane Witt, an Episcopal priest near Richmond, Virginia, tweets as Princess Pinky, @pinkypanda0823, in the persona of the National Zoo’s female cub Bao Bao. “It’s been really wild to see the friendships and connections that have come out of this,” she said. She interacts with Mary Lee the Shark and Reece Rhino.

Zoos have tapped into the trend. In 2015, the Chicago Zoological Society, in Brookfield, Illinois, published a report called “What Happens When Animals Tweet?” It ran a fifteen-month blind study of thousands of tweets about animals—popular species, such as dolphins, giraffes, and gorillas, as well as the less appealing Burmese pythons, anteaters, and wolves. Some were tweeted in the first-person voice of the animals; a separate set was tweeted by a naturalist speaking about the beasts in the third person. First-person tweeters garnered more followers.