The private life of the rabbit : an account of the life history and social behavior of the wild rabbit

164 Pages·1975·19.907 MB·English

by  Lockley, R. M. (Ronald Mathias), 1903-2000

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The
Private Life
of the Rabbit

The
Private Life
of the Rabbit
An Account of the Life History and
Social Behavior of the Wild Rabbit
R.M. Lockley
Introduction byRichardAdams
AuthorofWATERSHIP DOWN
9
EQUINOXBOOKS/PUBLISHEDBYAVON
Cover photograph hy David Mohrhardt
fromtheNational AudubonSocietv.
AVONBOOKS
Adivision of
TheHearst Corporation
959EighthAvenue
NewYork. NewYork 10019
Copyright© 1964by R. M. Lockley
IntroductionCopyright© 1974 by Macmillan Publishing
Company,Inc.
Published by arrangement with Macmillan
PublishingCompany.Inc.
Librar) oi CongressCatalogCard Number: 74-8855
ISBN: 0-380-00447-X
All rights reserved, which includesthe right to reproduce this
bookor portionsthereofin any form whatsoever. For information
address Macmillan PublishingCompanv. Inc.. 866Third Avenue,
NewYork, NewYork 1(K)22.
First Equinox Printing, October, 1975
EQl I\()\TRADEM\Kk REG. U.S.PAT.OFF.ANDINOTHERCOUNTRIES,
MARCAREGISTRADA, HKCIIOENU.S.A.
Printed in the U.S.A.
Introduction by Richard Adams
To have been asked to write an introduction to the American edition
of Ronald Lockley's The Private Life of the Rabbit gives me great
—
pleasure, and I—feel most grateful for this opportunity to express pub-
licly, as it were my own deep debt to this book and to its author. Most
obligations originate from personal help and mine to Ron Lockley is no
exception.
When I had finished telling the story of Watership Down to my chil-
dren (the greater part of it was extemporized to while away a long car
journey from London to the Shakespeare festival at Stratford-on-Avon)
and had, at their insistence, agreed to shape and write it as a novel, I
realized that before that novel could hope to possess any true dignity or
authenticity, then in spite of being myself a country-dweller and nature-
lover, I would need to know a good deal more about the ways and lives
of real —rabbits. Otherwise my rabbits would be little better than cute
bunnies as too many other rabbits have become, once trapped between
the ears of authors and the covers of their books. I went to a shop and
looked on its shelves for a good, informative book about the English wild
rabbit. Fortune was kind. What I happened upon was The Private Life
of the Rabbit.
I quickly discovered not only how little I myself had hitherto known
about "the rabbit wild and free," but also how little his true nature had
been understood by the world in general. From Ron Lockley I learned
that rabbits (as Strawberry protests to General Woundwort) had dignity
—
and "animality" the quality corresponding to "humanity" in men and
women. Their life pattern was fascinating and included several phe-
nomena not generally known. Far from being childlishly cute, they pos-
sessed by nature great courage and resourcefulness within, as it were, the
ambit of the limits, strength, and qualities given them by the Creator.
(This I later tried to express in the story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah.)
Nor were they nothing but runaways and "cow'rin', tim'rous beasties."
—
They could and did fight their enemies as well as each other. Inciden-
tally, I learned, they had been anthropomorphically maligned. They were
not unusually promiscuous and in many instances retained the same mate
for life. (W—e should not, ofcourse, think—of this as particularly virtuous in
an animal that would be sentimental but it is an interesting fact and
only shows how wrong wecan all persist in beingabout an animal once we
—
get an idea into our heads like the medieval notion that the pelican fed
her young with blood by wounding her own breast.)
6 Introduction by RichardAdams
My hope is that Watership Down may play some part in leading the
American public to read Ron Lockley's book and perhaps help a little to
obtain for this exceptional work of observation and natural history the
wide recognition it sur—ely deserves. For me, it is the ideal of a popular
work of natural history scholarly, concise, fascinating, and readable. We
— —
hear much today about pollution air, water, noise, and the like and
most people have rightly become highly conscious of our danger that we
may spoil the world in this way. But since we are the most powerful of
the world's inhabitants and therefore the world is our responsibility (not
justtheworldwecandowhatwelikewith), weshouldbe equally aware of
another, related danger. We need to learn more fully how to understand
and respect the animals, with whom we share the world. And as civiliza-
tion advances (if it does), one of our more important responsibilities
must be to look after the animals. Certainly we should control them and
surely we may make use of them, but we should do these things thought-
fully and we must learn not to abuse or waste the animals. Perhaps we
might bear more clearly in mind (as does Milton in Paradise Lost) that
in the creation myth of the book of Genesis, the first task given to Adam
was to name all the birds and beasts. Yet it would be no good tackling
our task merely by being sentimental; an animal is an animal and not a
sort of human being dressed up. Before we can act wisely we must appre-
ciate the facts and see the animals as they really are.
Ron Lockley is no sentimentalist. What he has to offer is understand-
ing based on patient, hardheaded observation. This is why The Private
Life of the Rabbit exemplifies what a work of natural history should be.
It is the book of an excellen—t naturalist, of a keen, shrewd, but feeling
mind and ab—ove all of a true that is to say, a sensitive, painstaking and
clear-sighted lover of this beautiful earth (well, a lot of it is still beauti-
ful, anyway) and of the "wondrous works of the Lord."
May 1974
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Contents
Introduction by Richard Adams PW 5
Author'sIntroduction 11
I The Mind ofa Rabbit 19
2 The Coney Garth 27
3 The Nucleus 37
4 The Dynasty in Plain 48
5 The Kings ofWood 60
6 Over-populated World 7i
Hard Times
7 77
8 The Idyll in Savanna 86
9 Life Underground 96
10 Reingestion 101
ii Population and Birth-control 109
12 Myxomatosis "5
*3 The Rabbit Wild and Free 130
Appendix 145
A Short Bibliography 150
Index ofSubjects 151