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
Richard Adams age of 96 in Oxford, England from complications of a blood disorder. In 1949, Adams married (Barbara) Elizabeth, daughter of R.A.F. Squadron-Leader Edward Fox Dyke Acland, son of the barrister and judge Sir Reginald Brodie Dyke Acland, whose father, the scientist Henry Wentworth Dyke Acland (himself created a baronet of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford) descended from the Acland baronets of Columb John. Until his death, he lived with his wife in Whitchurch, within of his birthplace. Their daughters, to whom Adams originally related the tales that became "Watership Down", are Juliet and Rosamond. Richard Adams Richard George Adams (9 May