Deconstructing human-canine relations in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the complex subject of human-animal relations and the animal question through Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs (1977), written parallel to the birth of the animal liberation movement in the late seventies. I begin by looking at how animals have been depicted in literature and in particular the dog story. Central to my analysis is the anti-vivisection movement and the Little Brown Dog Affair that placed suffering animals at the heart of animal narratives in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although many writers and critics condemn animal experiments and vivisection, there have been few fictional works that give a firsthand account from a nonhuman perspective. I look at how Adams’s “dog story” reads as a unique crossover narrative and how the novel deconstructs the human/animal divide. To do so I draw on the work of Peter Singer, Margo DeMello, Carol J. Adams, and Josephine Donovan amongst others to provide new analytical tools to build upon the significance of the novel. By examining the human-animal limits and deconstructing the very notion of humanity Adams brings to light the very question of what it means to be animal and what it means to be “humane”.

KEYWORDS:

• Richard Adams
• The Plague Dogs
• the dog story
• anthropomorphism
• animal experimentation
• anti-vivisection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I draw here on Margo DeMello (2012) who differentiates between critical animal studies as an academic field of study dedicated more explicitly to the abolition of animal exploitation and the interdisciplinary field of human-animal studies as the study of the interactions and relationships between human and nonhuman animals.

2. In the case of Adams’s best-selling classic Watership Down (1972), the book was turned down seven times by major publishers on the grounds that adults would not like it because it was about rabbits and was too childish and that children wouldn’t understand the sophisticated style, to which Adams replied: “I never write down to children. I write straight. They can take it or leave it” (Monaghan 2011, 13).

3. An animal studies theoretical approach like that of DeMello, which is aware of its own limitations and impasses, but nevertheless makes the effort to understand nonhuman animals, can be particularly useful to examine animal representations in literary texts.

4. Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903), which narrates the story of Buck who is kidnapped from his home and enlisted as a sled dog, or White Fang (1906), which traces a wild wolf’s domestication into a dog, are examples which read as a critique of the domestication of the dog whilst dealing with themes such as animal abuse and cruelty. More recently, in the same line of realistic animal stories, J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999), set in South Africa’s contemporary social and political conflict, deals with exploitation and apartheid but also entwines sexual and racial politics with themes of animal abuse and violence. Other, more recent, examples include Dan Rhodes’ Timoleon Vieta Come Home: A Sentimental Journey (2003), which reads as an interesting parody of Lassie, or Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog (2007), Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain (2008), Nancy Kress’ Dogs (2008) and David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (2008) all provide insight into the paradoxical ways dogs continue to be positioned and perceived in Western culture today.

5. Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (1786) reads as an early example of teaching morality to young readers through sympathy towards the non-human. Her book paved the way for nineteenth-century writers such as Mary Sherwood and her Soffrona and Her Cat Muff (1828), which also instructs children in kindness towards animals, and Anna Sewell and her famous animal “autobiography” Black Beauty (1877), both focused on the issue of how humans treat animals.

6. Nicola Hick’s “Monument to the Brown Dog” was commissioned by the National Anti-Vivisection Society and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection and unveiled in 1985 in Battersea Park, near the boating lake. In 1992 it was placed in storage and later reappeared in a more secluded spot.

7. The exceptions would be The Girl in the Swing (1980) and Maia (1984).

8. Adams actively campaigned against animal experimentation, cosmetic research and furs. He was also involved in Cruelty Free International to raise awareness about the cruelties of the trade in primates. In 1977 he took part in a lecture tour in Canada to oppose the hunting of baby seals and campaigned against cosmetic research, becoming part of the Hazleton Action Group in Harrogate in 1984.

9. See Eccleshare, Julia “Richard Adams obituary,” The Guardian, 27 December 2016.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/27/richard-adams-obituary

10. All quotations are taken from the 2015 edition.

11. Coniston was also home to the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, who was interested in the relationship between human and animal life and had an active interest in science. Ruskin resigned from his chair in Oxford in 1885 as a protest following the vote endowing vivisection in the University and retreated to “heal” at his home on the banks of Coniston Water.

12. The original hardback (1977), illustrated by the Lake District artist Alfred Wainwright (who was an ardent anti-vivisectionist too), includes not only pencil drawings of the area but route maps as a guide for the route taken by the dogs after their escape from the lab.

13. Peter Scott (1909–1989), a British ornithologist and environmentalist, was son of the Antarctic explorer Robert Scott. He was one of the founders of the WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature).

14. Ronald Lockley (1903–2000) was also an ornithologist and naturalist, and friends with Peter Scott as well as close friends with Adams. His research on rabbits, The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964), provided the basis for Adams’s Watership Down. In 1982 Lockley went to Antarctica with Adams, as testified in their book Voyage through the Antarctic (1982).

15. Ryder also served, like Adams, as chairman of the RSPCA, until 1979.

16. Two major works that had a significant impact in the field of human-animal studies in the 80s were Yi-Fu Tuan’s classic Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (1984), which examines the power relations in the human-pet relationship, and Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), which looks at how the human-animal relationship has been shaped by social attitudes and institutions.

17. The most influential works that followed are those of philosophers such as Tom Regan (The Case for Animal Rights, 1983) and Mary Midgley (Animals and Why They Matter, 1984). Others such as Val Plumwood (Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 1993) or Carol Adams (The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, 1990) have offered an ecofeminist approach to animal ethics by bringing the oppression of women and animals closer, arguing that animals are individuals with feelings and the capacity to suffer.

18. Satirical names like Boycott or the acronym A.R.S.E. are examples of how Adams deviates language as a way of “comic relief” for the reader.

19. In June 1976 the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) was formed in England by animal activist Ronnie Lee and started a campaign of “freeing” or “liberating” animals from laboratories using violent methods such as arson attacks on pharmaceutical laboratories, often causing damage in the process. The tactics generated so much publicity that the movement expanded internationally.

20. In 2018 Wes Anderson produced a science-fiction film titled The Isle of Dogs, strongly influenced by Martin Rosen’s animated adaptation in 1982 of The Plague Dogs, about an outbreak of canine flu in the fictional city of Megasaki, Japan. The mayor banishes all the dogs to an island, where Atari, the mayor’s distant nephew, goes to look for his missing dog Spots and befriends the other dogs.

21. Rosen’s adaptation abandons Adams’s novel’s “happy ending” and instead the dogs are forced to swim out to sea. The film ran briefly but was not well received by critics or audiences more accustomed to Disney’s sentimentalism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lorraine Kerslake

Lorraine Kerslake is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Alicante and a member of the Research Institute for Gender Studies. She has published widely on children’s literature and ecocriticism and is currently leading researcher of the project “Women Who Write Animals”. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (EASLCE) and is also a member of the Executive Board for European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (EASLCE). She is author of The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes’s Writing for Children (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of Imaginative Ecologies: Inspiring Change through the Humanities (Brill, 2021).