However, every 'experiment' described is one which has actually been carried out on animals somewhere.' In reality, no single testing or experimental station would cover so wide a range of work as Animal Research. A great dog hunt follows, which is later intensified with the fear that the dogs could be carriers of a dangerous bioweapon, such as the bubonic plague.Īdams stated in the book's introduction that 'There is no such place in the Lake District as Animal Research (Scientific and Experimental).

After the starving dogs attack some sheep on the fells, they are reported as ferocious man-eating monsters by an opportunistic journalist. They live on their own with help from a red fox, or 'tod', who speaks to them in a Geordie dialect. This book tells of the escape of two dogs, Rowf and Snitter, from a government research station in the Lake District in England, where they had been horribly mistreated. In 1982, The Plague Dogs was adapted into an animated feature film of the same name. Having seen a manuscript, both men readily agreed to be identified with the characters and opinions that Adams had attributed to them, as is shown in Adams' preface to the book. The conclusion of the book involves two real-life characters, Adams' long-time friend Ronald Lockley, and the world-famous naturalist Sir Peter Scott. The Plague Dogs features location maps drawn by Alfred Wainwright, a fellwalker and author. As in Adams' debut novel, Watership Down (1972), the animal characters in The Plague Dogs are anthropomorphised. The book centres around the friendship of two dogs that escape an animal testing facility and are subsequently pursued by both the government and the media. The Plague Dogs is a novel by English author Richard Adams, first published in 1977 by Allen Lane.

The plague dogs book