Intro
This book is like another episode in our hit lit series we've dubbed Humans Behaving Badly. On this episode, it's the bulldozers vs. the bunnies. Our main characters, those rascally rabbits, must search for a new home because people are coming to destroy their warren (a rabbit suburb).
As they see this adventure through, they fight off dogs and rival bunny bands, find a new home, and even rescue some lady friends from a rabbit-fascist. To the ecocritic, all of this can be understood as Adams's way of trying to get us to recognize animal dignity—what the author calls "animality."
Animality basically means never having to say "I'm sorry I killed you for no good reason, animal friend." And conservationists the world 'round applaud. Aldo Leopold, in one of the most famous accounts in all of environmental literature, reports that he watched the "green fire" die in the eyes of a female wolf he had shot. He wrote:
I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to men in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain.
And as Adams's tale would indicate, animals live epic lives. So if we apply Leopold's idea of a "land ethic" to Watership Down, we see green fire all over this novel. Adams is simply using animals talking like humans to instruct humans how to treat animals.
Phewf. It sure can take a lot to get humans to be nice to other creatures.
Quote
Animals don't behave like men, he said. If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.
Analysis
Ecocritics loves it when writers look at the world from an animal's point of view. And that's exactly what's happening here. So far as we know, rabbits don't get together and, just for kicks and giggles, plan raids on families of squirrels or raccoons.
Through the characters of Hazel and his brother, Fiver, Adams is showing us that rabbits have an ethic. They have, in some sense, values that govern how they treat the land and other animals. As you may have already realized, this fictional text has an awesome resonance with the writing of eco-head Aldo Leopold.
Leopold has written:
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
Even though Adams did attempt to capture these values in language—he called this ethic animality—he and Leopold were clearly on the same page. (We made a pun. Teehee.)
Adams even made a point of drawing heavily on the real-life mannerisms of rabbits in the wild to construct the rabbit-world of Watership Down. He quizzed his friend, the naturalist Ronald Lockley, relentlessly on the subject. So, for an allegorical text, Watership Down's got a good bit of realism in it. (Which led to much rejoicing in environmentalist circles.)