Bunny Hugs

By Stefan Knafer

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE RABBIT by R.M. LOCKLEY 152 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

The rabbit has a charming face; Its private life is a disgrace. I really dare not name to you The awful things that rabbits do. With this barking doggerel in view, Richard Adams created Water ship Down. That bestselling odyssey of a colony of migrating conies is very much like the adventures of prep school lads dressed up in fur costumes. Only occasionally do the principals seem to act as if they really had long ears and cottontails--and at those junctures the book ceases to be Water ship Down and becomes, instead, a little 1964 volume entitled The Private Life of the Rabbit by R.M. Lockley.

It is hardly a case of plagiarism. Adams liberally sprinkles references to Lockley's book in his bestseller, and his introduction to Private Life's first American edition is pure hero worship. Yet the disciple never really followed the work, which scorns sentimentality and shuns anthropomorphism. Lockley was apparently born with a seventh sense --of wonder--and has expended most of it on rabbits, which he has studied in every imaginable sort of enclosure, even including a real burrow with specially installed infra-red lighting and glass sides. Thus observed, the symbols of timidity are revealed as citizens in a complex social structure, full of dominant and submissive roles, populated with kings, queens and knaves. The butt of ceaseless fertility jokes turns out to be the master--or rather mistress--of birth control; when overcrowded or undernourished, the rabbit "resorbs" its embryos in utero. Adams' industrious Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig are pelt-deep fictions; in the real world, male rabbits are lallygagging drones. The does, contrary to those powder puffs in Watership Down, dig the burrows, run the homes and defend their young with Amazonian ferocity against such formidable enemies as the ferret, stoat and weasel.

Still, Adams' creatures are not entirely without foundation. The rabbit possesses uniquely repellent characteristics, among them the habit of consuming its own fecal pellets. But it also behaves in a manner that casts doubt upon the singularity of Homo sapiens. Young mated rabbits, for example, begin in a modest burrow but as their social standing in the community rises, they seek better quarters. Bucks are serially monogamous -- with sporadic liaisons, possible when an attractive surplus doe hops into view. The couple's offspring are welcome to stay in the burrow after adolescence -- provided that they remain docile and accept subordinate status.

"Rabbits are so human," begins Lockley in an echo of Beatrix Potter. Then he brings his audience up short with a question behaviorists have yet to answer:

Or is it the other way round -- humans are so rabbit?

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