Our forefathers treated animals a million times better than we do. They hunted and they produced meat and dairy, but they had some respect, some feeling, for those animals.
Today animals are treated as commodities, not as sentient beings. They are raised and slaughtered in barbaric factories. They are confined and tortured in testing labs. And we debase and diminish our own humanity by every act of cruelty upon a fellow creature.
As an animal sympathizer, I probably should have read Richard Adams’ Watership Down decades ago. But somehow I never got around to it until now. It’s not that it delivers an overriding message about animal exploitation. But it does subtly dramatize the everyday mistreatment of animals that our society tolerates. However, simple themes of courage, loyalty, friendship, and freedom were what the book was really about.
And those themes were presented in one of the most exciting, suspenseful plots I’ve ever read. I was on pins and needles for half the book.
The book is rather sexist, which is strange to say of a book about rabbits. But most books are sexist.
If you want to come across the names of every conceivable flower, tree and shrub in rural England, Richard Adams is your man. He’s amazing when it comes to knowing every obscure weed that grows upon the down or heath. Anyway, all things considered, it’s quite a remarkable and rewarding book.
Chuck Redman 