A FELLOW at the University of Oxford has won an Ig Nobel prize for his work living as an animal.

Charles Foster shared the spoof biology award with Thomas Thwaites who spent three days living as a goat in the Alps.

Mr Foster’s work, Being A Beast, saw him take on the perspective of a badger, an otter, a fox, a red deer and a swift.

The author said: “We have five glorious senses. Normally we use only one of them - vision. It's a very distorting lens because it's linked to our cognition. That means we get only about 20% of the information that we can squeeze out this extraordinary world.

"Animals, by and large, do a good deal better.

"In an attempt to see woods as the really are without that distorting lens of vision and cognition, I tried to follow five non-human species; badgers, foxes, otters, red deer and ridiculously swifts.

"It increased my understanding of what their landscape is really like rather than landscapes coloured by our colonial impressions of what those landscapes should be like.

"It also generated in me a good deal of empathy for these animals and we can do with a little more of that."

Mr Thwaites, wearing his prosthetic limbs, said the award was a "huge honour" as he collected the prize at a ceremony at Harvard University in the US.

He said: "I got tired of all the worry and the pain of being a human and so I decided I would take a holiday from it all and become a goat."

Volkswagen also got an honourable mention, winning the chemistry prize for "solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromagnetically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested".

The German car manufacturer was embroiled in a scandal after it emerged millions of its vehicles were fitted with software known as defeat devices to cheat emissions tests.