The man who once lived as a badger has made a show about pets

A drawing of a 14th-century guide dog, an ancient Egyptian road tax disc for a camel and Lewis Carroll’s personal copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are some of the items to go on display for a new exhibition highlighting humanity’s relationship with its pets.

Pets & their People opens in March at the ST Lee Gallery in Weston Library, part of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and charts how animals have shared our lives since times of antiquity. It is curated by the writer and veterinarian Charles Foster, a fellow of Exeter College Oxford and the author of Being a Beast, about his time “living” as various animals in the wild, including a badger and otter, in order to gain insight into the natural world.

“It is my opinion that pets are strange,” says Foster, who should know, having foraged in bins and slept in gardens like an urban fox. “When you take the emotional rewards away and just look at the relationship with logic, they are expensive, time-consuming and heartbreaking.

“Their presence in our lives demands an explanation. It has been a huge privilege to search for that explanation in the Bodleian archives and beyond. What I found was far more weird and exciting than I ever imagined. The exhibition is about pets, yes, but also about how to thrive as a human.”

Foster isn’t the only author to have taken on the guise of an animal. Hard-bitten crime novelist Raymond Chandler features in the exhibition; he made sketches and took photographs of his cats, and wrote a letter to an acquaintance in the voice of Taki, his beloved black Persian: “It has been suggested to me that I am a bit of a snob. How true! I prefer to be.”

One of the oldest exhibits is from ancient Egypt: a document that acts as a road tax disc and congestion charge pass allowing a camel to go through busy city streets.

A 14th-century Latin psalter depicts a dog on a lead being used by a disabled man as an assistance animal, and previously unseen snaps by the English photographer Daniel Meadows of a pet cemetery in Lancashire.

Also on display for the first time is an ultra-rare first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, one of only 23 surviving copies. Recently acquired by the Bodleian, the book was Carroll’s own and contains illustrations by John Tenniel depicting its anthropomorphic characters, including the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat.

Pets & their People runs from March 11 to September 27.

Photograph by Daniel Meadows courtesy the artist and Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford