Watership Down Hazel's sensitivity to Fiver with the "far more mechanical" attitude of the bucks towards the does portrayed as "little more than passive baby-factories". In the "New York Times Book Review" essay "Male Chauvinist Rabbits", Selma G. Lanes observed that the does are only "instruments of reproduction" to prevent the achievement of reaching "Watership Down" from "becoming a hollow victory". Lanes argued that this view of female rabbits came from Adams rather than his source text, Ronald Lockley's "The Private Life of the Rabbit" in which the rabbit world is matriarchal, and new warrens are initiated by dissatisfied young females. In
The Colours of Animals in evolution. She writes that Poulton's position was highly influential, stating that later "Darwinian experts on coloration" followed his views, citing Frank Evers Beddard's 1892 "Animal Coloration" as evidence. In his Introduction to Hugh Bamford Cott's 1940 book "Adaptive Coloration in Animals", Julian Huxley praised Cott's work as "a worthy successor to Sir Edward Poulton's "The Colours of Animals"... The one was a pioneer study, the other is in many respects the last word on the subject"". The Colours of Animals The Colours of Animals is a zoology book written in 1890 by Sir Edward Bagnall Poulton (1856–1943). It was