Humans are So Rabbit
This is a quote from naturalist R.M. Lockley in his book, The Private Life of the Rabbit. If R.M. Lockley or the title of his book sounds familiar, it may be because they inform a great deal of the beloved adventure novel by Richard Adams called Watership Down.
I read Watership Down the summer after I turned ten years old, and I have read it every summer since. It is dear to me, up there with Dickens, Austen, Vonnegut, Bradbury, and Tolkien.
You can imagine my surprise when I learned that Watership Down is not only not everyone’s favorite, it’s a highkey trigger.
Over a lovely dinner on a trip with some writer friends last year, the conversation turned, as we knew it would, to books. I shared my heartfelt opinion that Watership Down was an essential read, a novel that impacted my life so much that I’m still writing and talking about it decades after Mrs. Fox began reading it to our fourth grade class and told us if we liked it, we could finish it on our own for summer reading.
Between bites of pickled ginger and lotus root tempura, I encouraged everyone on the trip to read Watership Down. Someone across the table yelled, “No way! That book is brutal.”
Needless to say, what followed was a lively discussion about must-reads, triggers, nature, animals, preferences, and the power of storytelling.
The fact that my beloved childhood read was a trigger for some fascinated me. It felt like I had recommended my favorite ice cream flavor to someone (mint chocolate chip, that’s a post for another day) only to find out they were deathly allergic and didn’t even want to hear anyone mention it, much less taste it.
Granted, Watership Down includes scenes of death and violence: primarily man’s dismissive cruelty toward nature, but also the kind of violence you might see in a wildlife documentary between natural predators and prey. None of the violence is gratuitous, and the greater story speaks to a truth about our human existence. It resonated with me like the pealing of bells on the first day of summer, and it still does.
For others, it tolls like a funeral knell.
To wit, check out this Reddit book thread on Watership Down:
“Bunny rabbits get hurt. No thanks.”
“Badass bunny rabbits fighting for survival, actually.”
“Landless peasants driven out of hearth and home by soulless, unfeeling corporatic [sic] machinery.”
“A bunch of hard-nosed military, some civilians, a girl with visions (sorry fiver) and a brilliant egghead have to survive and rebuild their lives in a post-apocalyptic world.”
“Passivist commune makes the best of a bad situation.”
“Wise leader protects his people against deadly cult and fascist/communist dictatorship.”
Kinda makes you want to read the book, doesn’t it?
I love bunny rabbits, too, and I don’t want to see them get hurt, either. However, R.M. Lockley and Richard Adams offer an insight into the lives of rabbits that gives them much more agency than their floppy ears, childlike eyes, and fluffy tails would suggest.
The rabbits of Watership Down are just like us, and the manner in which they overcome their global challenges through each individual’s unique contribution, couldn’t be more applicable in today’s political and social climate.
There’s a psychic rabbit named Fiver who sees impending doom for his warren and convinces his brother Hazel to ask their leader, the Threarah, to save the colony, known as the Sandleford warren. The Threarah dismisses Fiver and Hazel, and seeks to have them arrested for challenging his authority. Hazel and Fiver flee with a rag-tag group of outsiders looking for a better life.
There’s Bigwig, an unusually large, vocal, and tough officer of the Threarah’s military, who feels stifled by the warren’s strict hierarchy. His comical moniker is thanks to a prominent tuft of fur on his head. Bigwig brings his friends, Silver and Buckthorn, who are loyal, strong, dependable, and equally disheartened by the Sandleford warren’s pecking order.
Blackberry, a clever and cunning rabbit with a scientific mind, and Dandelion, the swiftest of the group and a natural storyteller, join as well. A small, empathic rabbit named Pipken, and a strategic planner and healer named Acorn round out the group, with Hazel as their unassuming leader and Fiver as their oracle.
Each rabbit is undervalued by the Sandleford warren’s government, but it is their unique talents, their shared dream of a more fulfilling life, and their unflagging support of each other that make them a formidable assembly.
Many of the rabbits’ traits in Watership Down are drawn from R.M. Lockley’s observations of rabbits in the wild over the course of several years. He built an underground observation area to research rabbit behavior in their burrows and came to understand that rabbits had unique personalities that were more like humans than had been previously believed.
On their journey to create a new community on the chalk hill called Watership Down, Hazel, Fiver, and the gang encounter danger from predators, other communities with bizarre rituals, new and different geographical terrain, and clueless human beings. They befriend a kestrel named Keehar, a collective of field mice, and a group of hutch rabbits who they rescue from captivity. The Sandleford warren would never have allowed that kind of behavior.
The group had been brought up to believe that everything “non-rabbit” (especially “non-wild-rabbit”) was to be feared; over the course of their adventure, however, they learn that the old world view no longer serves them.
They struggle to navigate a barrage of difficult circumstances and evolve into a new kind of rabbit.
How?
By adapting to their new environment, being open to creative ideas, implementing them, working together toward a common goal, and valuing every member of the community. It’s not an easy journey, but it’s worth it.
If the thought of rabbits being harmed or attacked is a trigger for you, by all means follow your internal guidance and explore only what feels right to you. But if you’re intrigued by what the private lives of rabbits might say about our human condition, give Watership Down a read.
Humans are so rabbit.