Watership Down

Watership Down is an anthropomorphic fantasy novel by British author Richard Adams about a group of rabbits forced to leave their home and found a new warren.

After a young rabbit has a vision of his home warren destroyed, he and a small band of rabbits leave to search for a safe place to found a new home. They face harrassment from the militant caste of their old home and the dangers of the unknown, including rabbits from other warrens. Finally, they arrive at Watership Down, where, after a battle with another warren, they find peace. Adams' story follows the well-established formula of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth and also draws upon Ronald Lockley's The Private Life of the Rabbit a naturalist's study of actual rabbits.

Despite popular acceptance and best-seller status in both the United Kingdom and the United States, Watership Down is not without its detractors. Feminists criticize the depiction of females in the book as misogynist. Despite Adams' claim of using the behavior of real-life rabbits as source material, his invention of a male-driven, warrior-dominated rabbit society is actually the opposite of how rabbit social structures exist in the wild. The National Review said, "it has about the same intellectual firepower as Dumbo."