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 Civil Service to become a full-time author. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975. At one point, Adams served as writer-in-residence at the University of Florida and at Hollins University in Virginia. Adams was the recipient of the inaugural Whitchurch Arts Award for inspiration in January 2010, presented at the Watership Down pub in Freefolk, Hampshire. In 2015 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Winchester. In 1982, Adams served one year as president of the RSPCA. Besides campaigning against furs, Adams wrote "The Plague Dogs" to satirize animal experimentation (as