Rowf’s experience of humanity is entirely lab-centric. Snitter was a pet before his time in the lab, and he has that extra knowledge of the outside world, though scrambled from the experiments he’s undergone. He is at any rate an expert at writing a point of view consistent with what we know or believe we know about animals and sufficiently non-human) and his dogs are no exception. Adams is an expert at writing the world from an animal point of view (yes, yes, totally unfounded. And it’s about dogs.Īdams excels at nature writing in general, and Snitter and Rowf are written superbly. It’s about the harshness of life in the wild, about the human relationship to nature and the natural world and how we have changed it, about politics and the media (and science reporting!) and how a crisis is created and steered. The Plague Dogs are Snitter and Rowf, who have escaped from an animal research lab. I knew people talked about The Plague Dogs in the reverent tones reserved for the British tradition of traumatising kids with beloved media, and I kind of wanted in. I read Watership Down as a teen, and though it was all about nature being hard there was a pleasing amount of worldbuilding around the rabbits that scratched my fantasy itch, and I enjoyed it greatly. When Richard Adams died, I wanted to put one of his books on my list.

The plague dogs book